Thirty Avatar Short Stories
by Sophia Prester
Summary: Each of these thirty stand alone stories focuses on a different character from Avatar. Recent stories: 22. King Bumi. 23. Chief Arnook and Yue, 24. Zuko, 25. Azula, 26. Ursa, 27. Appa, 28. Monk Gyatso, 29. Iroh, 30. Smellerbee and Longshot.
1. Kanna: Keep your eyes on her horizon

**Introduction and disclaimer: **This is the first in a series of thirty stand-alone Avatar one-shots originally written for the 31days community over at livejournal. I will be uploading the fics as chapters to this one story since some of them are only a few hundred words in length. In terms of pairings, there's some implied Sokka/Yue, Sokka/Suki, and Longshot/Smellerbee, but not much else.

The characters and universe I'm playing with here are obviously not of my own creation, and these stories were written solely for entertainment, not profit.

* * *

_1. Keep your eyes on her horizon_

"You'll learn to love him."

That's what her mother said, and her grandmother, and five aunts, and any number of cousins.

"Kanna, give it time. Your heart will eventually come around--it's the way of things."

Kanna was savvy enough, even back then, just to smile and nod and pretend to agree with those who clearly knew better. She would say nothing about the desperation in her cousin Aakulu's eyes, or the quiet resignation in her sister Naitaka's voice when they said:

"At least he's a _good_ man..."

But having a good man just wasn't good enough. She wanted to yearn for someone they way that her heart yearned to know what lay beyond that distant line that separated sea from sky.

"But he loves you, Kanna. He loves you more than anything. Surely you can see that, can't you?"

She saw it, and it made her feel guilty every time she stared out at the southern horizon and thought about a place where she could follow her heart and not simply wait for her heart to fall in line with tradition.

One day, she took a double ration of seal jerky and a triple ration of water, and set off in her canoe to see what she could find. She chased the horizon for weeks, nearly dying several times over, paddling until her shoulders burned and her arms felt like twisted and knotted rope, going days without food, and not caring if she ever saw land again.

At times she took off her necklace and studied the carved pendant as if she'd never seen it before, turning it this way and that to catch the light as she lay back in her canoe. The waves would rock her to sleep and she would wonder if she could ever learn to love anyone more than she loved the far horizon, the open sea, and the endless journey.

* * *

**Author's note: **OC names in here were taken from Inuit folklore. 


	2. Momo: still flying

_2. still flying_

He does not think of himself of the last of his kind. He does, however, keenly remember losing the others in his first troop.

It started out slowly. Just the usual losses due to age, accident, and predation. He himself saw one of his kin punched out of the sky by a leopard-hawk, and he still dreams about the sudden squeal and the baffling emptiness in the air beside him. He knew instinctively that when troop members who were too old and infirm to fly more than a few feet at a time crawled down the mountain to find a sunny spot in the grass where they could sleep, warm and undisturbed, they would not be coming back. Others simply never returned from foraging. There were kits who did not thrive, and wounds that did not heal. Such was the way of things. The troop inevitably and eventually recovered from such losses.

But then came the strange and muddled time when troop-mate after troop-mate simply started to grow weak and listless for no reason that he could smell. At first, it was just that no one had the energy to play, even though winter was a long way off. Then, no one had the energy to hunt. One by one, they each slunk off to dark places in the ruins, curling up into little balls and shivering violently until shivering stopped altogether. He still has vague memories of huddling in a corner of the old temple, struggling for each burning, rattling breath.

He never understood or even asked why his breathing suddenly began to ease again when his troop-mates' did not. He did understand, however, that no new kits had been born to replace those who had been lost. Eventually, he made his way back out into the sunshine, but he was the only one.

He remembers numberless days afterwards, sitting on top of one of the fractured spires of his too-empty home and feeling his ears prick up in excitement and then collapse again as he realized that no, that speck against the sky was just another bird.

Those lonely days are gone, however. One of those specks in the sky turned out not to be a bird after all.

He has a new troop, now. Yes, they look and smell strange, they don't have even a kit's knowledge of the social niceties that keep a troop running smoothly, and three of them are tragically hopeless when it comes to something as simple as flying.

It doesn't matter, though, that they are strange, or that they sometimes make him want to chew off his own fur in frustration (he'll never, ever understand why they keep seeking out threats rather than finding a nice grove of fruit trees where they can sleep, and eat fruit, and hunt insects in peace for the rest of their days). What matters is that he has warm bodies to curl up against at night, and two strange, repeated syllables that somehow indicate _him_ and no other.

What matters is that he now has two others flying along side him. The fact that one is as large as a mountain and the other is strangely furless does not matter.

What matters is that as long as the three of them are still flying, he is not the last of his kind.

* * *

Next up: Toph 


	3. Toph: She dreams in color

_3. She dreams in color_

Toph may be blind, but she knows what white is. White is feathers and down, white is pillows and blankets piled high, white is being shut off from all sensation.

Her mother once told her a story about a fine young lady (which meant that the story was meant to be A Lesson, and which meant that Toph was immediately on the defensive) who was so refined and so sensitive (and so useless, Toph mentally added) that she was able to detect one miserable little dried pea under vast strata of mattresses and featherbeds.

Toph isn't sure what the story is meant to teach her, because as far as she's concerned, it's pure, unadulterated crap. Feeling a pea? Under all that fine and fancy bedding she is tucked away into each and every night? No way.

No, the feather and the blankets and the pillows and the quilts muffle every damned thing, turning her world into an expanse of what she always thinks of as _white_. Blankness, nothingness. She can barely even tell up from down.

She wonders if her mother knows what kind of prison she is creating as she carefully fluffs the pillows and turns down the blankets just so. Sometimes, Toph is positive that her mother _does_ know.

She's being put away into a soft, feathery nest, much the way her mother puts her jewelry away into padded velvet boxes. Her mother helps her up into bed (even though Toph doesn't need any help), and then pulls the sheets up over her carefully, as if the finely woven linen would bruise and abrade her skin. Then there's the barest brush of a kiss on her forehead, a soft "good night, Toph," and then her mother simply vanishes. Toph cannot feel her footsteps, cannot feel the door sliding shut behind her. Nothing. She's trapped in the white.

And so every night she waits until long after everyone else has gone to sleep. Then, Toph slides out of her confusing, confounding bed, moving gingerly until her foot touches solid ground and she can see again.

It's child's play to sneak out into the garden; now that she's freed from her bed she can "see" all the servants from rooms away. Once she's made it outside, she heads straight for the pile of gravel that's used to refresh the walks and the dry gardens.

She flops down into the rocks with an un-ladylike grunt of satisfaction. The gravel makes way for her and skitters over her to form a comfortingly rough blanket, but it does not coddle her. She feels each bump and jagged bit, but that's the way her bed is _supposed_ to be. She's supposed to be able to feel the distant footsteps, the slow growing of roots beneath the earth, the deep background rumbling of tectonic plates sliding against each other far, far away. It lulls her to sleep, far more comforting than any stupid featherbed could hope to be.

Toph may be blind, but she likes to think that she dreams in color.

* * *

Next up: Tui and La (yes, the two fish)  



	4. Tui and La: A life unlived

Notes: Hints of Sokka/Yue, but only by implication

* * *

_  
4. A life unlived_

The two carp circle each other as they have for millennia. Never touching, yet always together, pulled and pushed in an unending circle by the current they create by their own swimming.

They do not often speak to each other. There is no need, as they rarely have anything to talk about, but things have changed. They speak.

"What was it like, to live as a human?" asks La, voice as deep and dark as the ocean.

"Short," replies Tui, voice as light and distant as the moon. "Short, and confining, and painful, and miraculous. I fell in love."

They swim in silence a while longer, then La asks:

"Do you regret it?"

The moon moves from quarter to gibbous and past full again before Tui speaks again. For them, it is but a brief pause, hardly a breath.

"I regret only the things that did not happen."

"Ahhh..." The ocean sighs. There has never been any room for jealousy or envy, not for them. What diminishes one diminishes the other, just as what enriches one enriches the other. "Tell me, then, of these things that did not happen."

There's no answer, not at first, but as the moon wanes and waxes through another cycle, Tui's story spins out as slow as the seasons and inevitable as as the tides. La swims, and listens, and mourns for love cut short and for unborn and dearly loved children who would never be cradled by the ocean and watched over by the moon.


	5. Zhao: Therein lies the denouement

_5. Therein lies the denouement_

All he needed now was an army, and the authority to command enough ships to bring that army to the North Pole.

One more promotion. That was all it would take. Just another year, perhaps, two at most.

Zhao stepped out onto the balcony of the regional governor's palace. He could still hear the babble of the party coming out from the open doors, and he thought he heard someone ask where he was going, but he ignored it. He had made his rounds, had introduced himself to all of the proper people, and had had the required conversations with those who had the power to further his career. He was free to go outside for a few moments if he chose.

The moon was full and hung low on the horizon. It was only optical illusion that made it look as large as it did, he told himself.

He held up his cup of shochu--his fifth one of the night--in a mocking toast to his enemy. Moonlight glinted along the rippling surface of the alcohol as if in challenge.

"Not much longer, now," Zhao stated, coolly staring at the full moon as if he could make it blink. The gray markings on the moon did not move.

Some of the stories he had found in the Library said that the markings were an image of a woman forever braiding her hair. Others said it was a rabbit. Others, a leaping fish. One legend even said it was a man carrying a bundle of sticks and leading a small dog.

Zhao, however, had always seen the markings as a face--a face that was pleasantly frozen in agony and despair.

"I _know_ who you are," Zhao said. He took a generous sip of his shochu, savoring the way the strong liquor burned down his throat; the art of distillation had always seemed to him like firebending turned inwards. The fire of the shochu only served to feed the fire that was already burning inside of him. "I know where you're hiding."

Again, someone called him to come back inside, away from the moonlight, and Zhao thought he detected a shrill edge to the person's voice. Some veteran of the wars against the Northern Water Tribe, he thought. For some of the survivors, their dread of the full moon was almost a full blown superstition.

He toyed with the idea of telling some of these men what he had learned about the eclipse, and what it had done to the Fire Nation all those years ago. How much of a push would it take, he wondered, to turn superstition into genuine phobia? It might be interesting to find out.

"Once I kill you, those men will follow me _anywhere_," he told the giant, screaming face, jabbing his finger towards the ground to emphasize his point. He supposed he was a little drunk, because otherwise, why would he have abandoned a rather pleasant party in order to stand out in the chill autumn air, threatening the moon? Those were not the actions of a sober man. Even so, he drained the rest of his cup in one swallow. "Not long now. I just need the men. That's all. An army's strength to hold off your precious waterbenders, and that's it. It'll be all over."

The moon did not blink. Disgusted, Zhao tossed the delicate, fragile cup over the rail of the balcony and into the rosebushes. The faint chiming of shattered porcelain sounded almost like distant, mocking laughter.

Zhao turned on his heel and stalked back towards the party. He paused for just a moment, though, and turned and looked back over his shoulder.

"They'll tell stories about me, you know. It's just a matter of time."

With that, he turned his back on the moon and headed back inside. He told himself that the only reason he thought he heard a distant, mocking voice ask him what _kind_ of stories they would tell was because he'd had too much to drink. He would not let such foolish thoughts bother him, because. He was going to follow this road where it led, because he knew it could lead only to glory.

Still, for the rest of the evening, Zhao avoided anyone who had served in the north and who might have tales to tell about the moon.


	6. Joo Dee, Long Feng: One Among Many

_6. One among many_

Lien was just one among many who came to Ba Sing Se in search of a new life, but she liked to think that she was special, unique. For one thing, she wasn't just another refugee, not unless it was from the sheer drudgery of working on a small farm that was miles from even the most backwater of towns.

Everyone back home who listened to her endless tales and endless dreaming warned her that so many people were fleeing to Ba Sing Se that good work was getting harder and harder to find. They told her they'd heard that more and more people were being turned away before they could even get onto the train into the city, but Lien simply ignored them.

She was special. She would succeed. She would become someone.

After all, she was _different_. Everyone had always told her that she was pretty, and that she had a nice smile. Frequent checks in the mirror had confirmed that this was, in fact, so.

Lien knew that no matter where you went in the wide, wide world, even Ba Sing Se, pretty girls could always find a good job in a flower shop, perhaps, or a tea shop, or anywhere else where the patrons would appreciate a trim figure and a nice smile. Eventually, the right person would notice her, and her fortune would be made.

And so she left home, with a bag lightly packed with essentials and a head packed full of dreams.

Once she walked onto the platform where she would board the train in the city proper, however, she saw that she truly was just one among many. In a place the size of Ba Sing Se, there was a surplus of nice figures and friendly smiles.

Her bag slipped from her hand and landed heavily on the platform. Lien bit her lips together, unsmiling, and concentrated on not crying. She thought about turning around and going back home right then and there, but just the thought of having to crawl back and admit she was wrong made her dizzy with shame.

A month, Lien told herself. She would give it a month. Her resolve was firm, but she still hesitated before reaching down to retrieve her bag. It turned out that there was no need to reach--she had barely started to move when someone slipped the bag's handle into her hand.

"Are you here to look for work?" The stranger's voice was deep and rich, and it sounded like what Lien imagined velvet must feel like.

Lien nodded. She was still too shaken to want to speak.

"Please, let me see that pretty smile again. A young lady such as yourself should smile when she finds herself on the verge of entering such a great city as this," the man said, and his voice was courtly and kindly and not at all flirtatious.

Lien found she couldn't help smiling just a little.

"Are you here with your family? If you're lost, I'd be happy to help you find them..."

For a moment, she thought she caught a glimpse of something predatory behind the courtliness and kindness. Instinct told her she should tell this man about her three very large, very overprotective (and very non-existent) brothers who were right around the corner and who would be back any minute now, really they would, but she hesitated long enough that any answer she gave would be an obvious lie.

She shook her head, and the man bowed his own slightly, obviously pleased. "If you're in need of a job, I believe I may be able to help out an attractive young woman such as yourself."

Oh, Lien was suspicious, all right. It didn't matter that she'd grown up in the back of beyond--everyone knew that strange men didn't just walk up to pretty young women and start offering jobs unless there was something unsavory going on.

But then the man introduced himself as Long Feng, Grand Secretariat of Ba Sing Se, and there was nothing unsavory about that, was there? It seemed almost too good to be true, but his signet ring seemed genuine enough, as did the respect shown by several richly dressed men who paused to bow to him as they hurried past.

"Come with me. You will never have cause for want or worry again," he assured her, draping an arm across her shoulders. She did not notice how his cloak neatly hid her from view as he ushered her towards a private car (so private that it traveled on its own private track) or how several men in uniform fell into formation both ahead and behind them, quickly and effectively cutting off any avenue of escape. Long Feng kindly offered to carry her bag for her, but when she wasn't looking, he passed it to one of the uniformed men, who in turn passed it along to someone else who eventually disposed of it in an incinerator.

This was it, she told herself as she disappeared into the tunnels beneath the city. She'd had her lucky break. She was special.

She would become someone.

And indeed she did.

"My name is Joo Dee..."

After all, there was always a good job waiting for a pretty girl with a nice smile.

She was special.

"...welcome to Ba Sing Se."

She was just one among many.


	7. Koh the Face Stealer: Face to Face

_7. Face to face_

Any fool with a sharp knife and a sure hand can remove a man's face. That's nothing but butchery. Slice through skin, tear muscle from bone, hack through sinew, blood making everything slick, slippery.

Not his style. No. Not his style at all.

It takes skill to remove a soul. Skill and finesse and knowing the right moment to strike. Yes.

Koh loops through the exposed roots of the old mangrove, up and down, back and forth, a multitude of legs rippling in irregular waves. His face changes with each sinuous curl. He runs through each of them in turn. Savoring. Remembering.

He knows them all. He's tasted every part of them, every sin, every secret, every sordid desire. He sifts through them, takes the tasty bits and casts the rest aside in his bone heap. The body is always left behind. For some reason, the bodies always continue on even after he's taken every bit of them that matters.

Sometimes, people come to him, flies to a tasty honey-trap, seeking what he knows, looking for just one little scrap from that heap of knowledge he's hoarded up bit by bit over the years.

Every thought, every dream, every bit of wisdom, every shred of hope. He takes it all. And he is not willing to let it go.

To take someone's face is to take who they are. It's simple, really. He's lost a few victims (that child monk, for one), but most of them fall--fall and are devoured.

All he needs to do is find one hook. Just one. Foothold, toothold, clawhold--the chink in the armor, the crack in the façade, the way in. That's all. Once he knows what they feel, he knows what they are. Once he knows what they are, he sees their true face.

And once he sees their true face, they... they at last see _his_. It is the last thing they will ever see.


	8. Katara: Tell me 'bout the ocean

_8: Tell me 'bout the ocean moving in slow motion_

The basics of waterbending came naturally enough to her--a little _too_ naturally, perhaps. When she was no more than three, Katara happened to throw a massive tantrum (Sokka plus scissors plus Katara's favorite doll plus an impromptu haircut equaled a _very_ unhappy Katara). The tantrum stood out in peoples memories for three reasons.

The first had to do with the volume of her screams. Katara was normally a very obliging and even-tempered child, but she had a set of lungs on her that would give even a whale-tortoise pause.

The second had to do with the way the kettle of boiling water she was standing next to suddenly and explosively boiled over in firm defiance of both gravity and probability.

The third had to do with the way the boiling water (again in firm defiance of both gravity and probability) managed to _not_ drench and scald the screaming toddler.

The very next morning, her Gran-Gran took her to the ocean, sat her down on the edge of the ice, and told her to pay very close attention. True, her Gran-Gran was no waterbender, but she seemed to know something about them.

"I can't show you waterbending myself, Katara. I'm afraid you'll have to learn from the ocean," she said, hands pushing then pulling in the air in a way that struck Katara as being oddly familiar. "Watch the way it moves, learn its moods and make them your own. The ocean is the best teacher you could ever have." If she sounded as if she was quoting someone, or thinking about someplace very far away, Katara ignored it in her impatience to learn more about this whole waterbending thing.

And so Katara watched, and she learned about the gentle but strong push-pull of the ocean. She learned how to feel it in the swaying of her own body and she learned to appreciate the ache in her arms as she used them to mimic and then alter the shifting of the waters.

Katara did well enough on her own--for a while, anyhow. Her tribe found that her ability to lift the water in gentle swells came in handy for lifting boats off of rocks and sandbars, or for coaxing water from places it shouldn't be (sleeping bags, floors, the insides of canoes) and into places where it should (kettles, water skins, down the back of Sokka's shirt).

But somehow, this was not enough. She knew she was missing something. Even with the help of the scroll she stole from the pirates, there was something she simply wasn't getting. There was some lesson she had missed.

When she learned how to heal, and remembered how cool water could soothe and restore, it seemed both a step forwards and a step backwards for some reason. The soothing and calm was a distraction, a diversion from something vital.

In the end, it was Master Pakku who taught her what she was missing, but not, perhaps, in the way that either one ever would have expected.

There was no moment of formal instruction. There wasn't even a push in the right direction, as she'd had with Gran-Gran's instructions to "pay attention."

No, there was no teaching. In fact, Pakku ordered her to _apologize_ for wanting to learn. For a moment she actually considered it, if only for Aang's sake, but then she remembered the overflowing kettle and she remembered the whip-crack sundering of ice that could swallow men whole.

Challenging the old man was utterly, utterly _stupid _she told herself frantically, but she was already caught up in a storm surge, and there was no chance of swimming against those, only hope and the luck to keep your head above water. She finally remembered the ocean's strength. She remembered the riptides. She remembered water crashing against rock. She remembered tidal waves, and the way ice fractured like glass and became deadly in a rushing current.

It was exhilarating. And it was terrifying.

In the end though, she also remembered how the ocean would always return to calm after a storm. Then, in the days that followed, as she learned from Pakku (and he from her, as he informed her gratefully) she also remembered how the waves would both eat away and add to the ice shelf slowly across the seasons and the years.

This happened in their lessons, and it happened in the quiet after their lessons, as she told him stories about her Gran-Gran, and what she had told her about the ocean.

"I told her that, you know," Pakku said. If he sounded a little smug, it was completely understandable.

"I know," she replied, smiling.

"And did she tell you," he said, serious now, and a little hesitant, "that there is no end to the ocean's lessons?"

Katara shook her head, but other than that, she stayed silent and prim. Gran-Gran had said nothing about that, probably because she had seen no need.

"But you already knew that, didn't you?"

"Yes," she said in a voice that was as small as the ocean was large. "I know."

She wasn't sure when she had figured it out. Early on, maybe. The basics of waterbending had always come easily to her, but it was only now that she was beginning to understand how much she _didn't_ know about the infinitely gentle, infinitely destructive element that had claimed her for its own.


	9. Cabbage Merchant: Take this job

_9. Take this job and shove it_

He stared at the form. His mouth was pursed and his pen was poised and dripping ink over one of the many spots that ordered the form-filler to _initial here_.

It wasn't a hard form to fill out. Most of it he'd been able to muddle through, even without the help of the clerk at the Ba Sing Se Labor Placement Bureau (nice girl, aggressively helpful, and by gum if she didn't have the widest smile he ever did see). _Name_, no problem. _Place of birth_, same, although he wasn't sure that "in the barn on a clean ostrich-horse blanket" was quite what they were looking for there. _Age_, also not a problem, even though he'd fudged it a bit.

The blank that was giving him so much trouble should have been simple. It merely said _vocation_.

Well, what was there to say to that? The obvious answer wasn't really true any more, was it?

How could he call himself a cabbage merchant if he had no cabbages left to sell?

Oh, he'd lost crops before. What farmer hadn't? He couldn't even begin to count the number of times he'd lost an entire field of plump, tasty cabbages to a slug infestation. That was just the way of things. Some years, you did well. Other years, you spent every waking minute out in the field with a sharp eye and a shaker of salt at the ready.

Lately, though, it was almost as if he'd been cursed. First, all that nonsense in Omashu, with his glorious green cabbages scattered hither and yon like so many beads fallen from a lady's necklace. Three times, his cabbage-cart had been upset. Three! And all his cabbages ruined. He'd received no sympathy from his wife, who'd only wanted to hear about how he'd encountered the Avatar not just once, but twice.

Then, after the Fire Nation had taken over the city and he'd fled to Ba Sing Se, faithful cabbage-cart in tow, he'd suffered loss after loss again. Customs officials accused him of bringing an infestation of cabbage slugs into the city. A platypus bear demolished his cart. Then finally, after he'd set out with a repaired cart and a few, precious beautiful cabbages (perfect for dumplings! perfect for slaw!) that his wife had somehow sneaked through customs, the whole lot was devoured by a rabbiroo. Said rabbiroo had, of course, been turned loose upon his innocent vegetables by none other than The Avatar, He Who Had Become Death, Destroyer of Cabbages.

That was it. He'd had it. And so he'd come here, in the hopes that Ba Sing Se's bureaucracy would be able to shove him into a decent job.

A decent job, he thought. What would that look like?

To be honest, it looked a lot like cabbages.

The employment form went into an appropriately labeled waste bin (the Dai Li, from all accounts, were a bit on the strict side when it came to littering). Then, he headed out into the city.

His first stop was the local tea-shop. The tea was good, as it always was, and for once he was glad to have the surly scar-faced boy as his server, and not the garrulous and kindly old man. It was thinking time he wanted, not gossip and time wasted casually coming up with solutions to all the world's problems.

He thought, and he thought some more. He thought until he realized that there wasn't anything to think about, really. The answer was utterly simple.

His next stop was a general store, or the closest thing he could find to one in this too-big city that somehow managed not to have many of the things he considered part of normal life.

By nightfall, he was back out in the field he and his wife had rented. It was only an acre, and a third of that spent much of the day in shadow thanks to its proximity to Ba Sing Se's outermost wall. It was too dark to do anything, but he stood out there, surveying the field and holding the packet of cabbage seeds he'd just purchased, picturing each dark furrow filled with what looked like gigantic green pearls.

While his dreams may have been small, they were _his_ dreams, and it would take more than a few setbacks to keep him from following them.


	10. Mai: Never a dull moment

_10. Never a dull moment_

As far as Mai was concerned, there were few things in the world worse than boredom. Unfortunately for her, it seemed that much of her life had been practically nothing _but_ boredom.

When she was a child, there were the obligatory deportment classes. Boring.

In due time, she was shipped off to the Fire Academy for Girls, which meant even _more_ deportment classes, along with teacher after teacher who was nowhere near as smart as she was. Also boring.

But then, just when she thought she might perish of ennui, classes were shuffled around and school finally brought her Azula.

At first, Mai had dismissed the other girl as just another species of _boring_. After all, Azula was pretty, smart (but not so much that it was a social handicap), a superb firebender, _and_ granddaughter of the Fire Lord on top of it all. Whoop-de-do.

In theory, Little Miss Perfect should have bored Mai to tears, or at least to an ill-concealed yawn of contempt. Still, even on that first day, there was something there, some little... _something_ that didn't quite add up, and Mai thought that maybe she ought to keep a close eye on Little Miss Perfect. She also thought that maybe, just maybe, school had gotten the tiniest bit more interesting.

Observation finally paid off barely three weeks later. They were in calligraphy class (not just boring, but utterly pointless, which was even worse). Mai was fighting to stay awake, entertaining herself by adding barely visible extra strokes to her characters in order to twist the meanings to something a bit more morbid than "love" and "flower" and "grace."

They had just five minutes left in class when Mai noticed Azula reach out ever so slightly and flick her hand towards the girl sitting next to her. The next thing she knew, the other girl had leapt from her seat and was swatting at the back of her neck and screaming in pain. A tiny wisp of smoke drifted up from her hair.

"Now, _that_'s kind of interesting," Mai whispered.

The teacher was quick to ask Azula what had happened (Azula was the only firebender in the class, after all, and therefore the most likely culprit), but her voice was unsteady, and she wrung her hands in front of her as she spoke. She wrung them so hard that her fingers were patched red and white. Mai raised one eyebrow. From the woman who was quick to go across someone's palms with a ruler for simply coughing out of turn, this was very odd behavior indeed.

What did their teacher know about Azula that the rest of them didn't? why was she so scared? Wait a moment... Mai blinked. Their teacher was _scared_ of Little Miss Perfect? Huh.

Things had just become _very_ interesting.

Mai raised her hand. When the teacher called on her, Mai responded in a voice that was at its don't-bother-me weariest. "Ma'am, Lady Azula was working on her calligraphy when Ling started screaming like a stuck pig." Ling squawked at the editorial comment, but Mai pretended not to hear. "I just happened to be looking up at the time, and..."

She shrugged as if she couldn't be bothered to continue. Ling looked utterly betrayed, but Azula had turned halfway around in her seat and was giving Mai a cool, speculative look.

Later in the class, while Azula was doing an exercise at the front of the room and was therefore nowhere near her former victim, Mai pulled a pin out of her reticule, and with a sharp snap of her wrist, sent the pin sailing with tidy accuracy right into the nape of Ling's neck.

"She really did squeal like a stuck pig," Azula said to Mai after class. She even did a pretty good imitation of a squealing Ling. What she didn't do was ask Mai why she'd covered for her, not just once, but twice.

"I think I'll keep you around," Azula said, musingly. "I imagine you'll come in handy, one of these days."

"Cool."

Yes, life around Azula would very likely prove to be anything _but_ boring, Mai thought. In fact, she probably ought to figure out what to do if things threatened to become a little _too_ interesting.

* * *

Author's note: Even though Azula appears in this story, she gets a story of her own later on. 


	11. Sokka: both and

_11. both/and_

You know, there are times when a guy just doesn't know _what_ to think.

What am I talking about? The usual. Thinking about life. About what's real. You know... about stuff. You know what I mean. Or not. Right.

Okay, how to explain this? Well, it's kinda weird.

Let's start with something close to home. Well, close to my home, anyhow. There's this thing that's kind of important to us, down in the Southern Water Tribe. The wolf thing. You know. The whole painting our faces before going into battle. The warrior's wolf-tail, like the one I'm wearing here--and if you pull on it one more time, then so help me...

Right. Rightrightright. Physical threats don't work on you. You've made your point, Suki. Now will you please stop twisting my arm because it's really not supposed to bend in that direction.

Anyhow, like I was saying. Wolves. Yeah, it's all supposed to bring the spirit of the wolf... no, not a wolf-bear, or a wolf-seal, or a wolf-_anything_. I told you going in that this was going to be heading into some weird territory--cactus juice weird, I'm tellin' ya. So, this is all supposed to bring the spirit of the wolf to us, and maybe it's just a metaphor for how we're like a pack, just one big family looking out for each other, and yeah, that's kind of how I think about it most of the time. But there's part of me that thinks that way and does those things because it feels _right_. It's who I am, if that makes any sense, and maybe I do believe in the whole wolf thing just a little.

Of course, now that I've met Aang, and seen the whole Avatar thing (which is kinda cool in a "please, please don't let me die" sort of way, so if the little guy starts in with the glowing and the floating and the spinny winds--run). Well, now that I've seen that, and been kidnapped into the spirit world by some really cranky forest spirit... well, maybe there's more to it than that. Maybe there really _is_ a spirit of the wolf, and--

The spirit world? What was it like? Well, it was...

It was dull. Really, really, _really_ dull. But also kinda sparkly. Blue and sparkly. And _man_ did I have to pee when I got out of there. Barely made it to the outhouse... and no I don't know why I couldn't pee while I was in there! What kind of question is that, anyhow?

Then, there was the library spirit--that was freaky--and the ocean getting up and walking and smashing up the Fire Nation navy. All very, very freaky and very, very convincing. If it didn't mean giving up meat and having to go live in a remote place where there would be no girls (meaning no you, which would be no good at all), I might even consider becoming a monk. That's how convincing it all was. Anyhow, that's the woo-woo side of thing, so now that that's done, we get to move on to the part where I say "now, on the other hand--"

Huh? Why did I leave out Yue and...

...yeah.

Yeah, I saw it. Her. The moon. And you know what? I don't really want to talk about that right now. Actually, I don't want to talk about it ever. In fact, if you could just put that on your "this is something I will not talk to Sokka about" list, that would be a _fantastic_ idea.

No. Forget I said that. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell. Anyhow, you know that story, or enough of it, at least.

Nah, I'm fine. Just give me a second here. It's just that you got me thinking about wolves and the moon and...

Right. Moving on, now.

Now, on the other hand, there's all this other stuff. And at first, it was weirder than all the woo-spookity-woo that I've been dealing with.

I've always been Mr. Practical. I've always been good with things, and with figuring out how thing work. Heck, I even was able to come up with ways to fake firebending and earthbending. So the firebending thing didn't work...it was still a good idea!

Sheesh.

The big thing, though, was when we went to the Northern Air Temple. It kinda sucked for Aang, because we're flying up and wow! Airbenders! Only, not so much. I felt so bad for the little guy, but then I realized that these people had figured out how to fake _airbending_. They could _fly_.

And that--that was just cool.

Meeting that inventor guy? Even more cool (although the whole working for the Fire Nation thing--not so cool).

In a way, it was even spookier than all the stuff with giant snake-owl librarians or Aang getting possessed by Avatar Kyoshi (a whole species of weird unto itself, let me tell you, but I kinda wish you'd been there to see it).

It was spooky because it felt right, kinda like painting my face before going into battle felt right, back at the South Pole. All those numbers and stuff? The properties of air and solids and gas and aerodynamics and metal fatigue and vector analysis and fluid dynamics all that other stuff that makes Toph not even pretend not to be bored when I try to explain it?

It was easy. All he had to do was show me a few things and teach me a few concepts, and off I went. Just like that. Just like I figured out the planetarium in the Library after being shown once and _damn_ I wish we could have had some more time in there, but anyway...

It was kinda like Katara with her waterbending, you know. It came easily to me, and it always had--I just didn't know how much there was to come easily.

The whole science thing... amazing. Just amazing. No woo, no spirits, no homicidal librarians, no blue-floaty-please-don't-hurt-me spells. It's like... I could bend air without actually being an airbender.

You see, I'm the idea guy. It kinda freaked me out when the others pointed that out, but then again, Katara kinda freaked when she first started with the waterbending thing. But anyhow, that's me. The guy who helped invent a warship that could sail through the air. The guy who figured out how to take down a Fire Nation tunneller.

You know--the idea guy.

But I'm also the guy who sometimes paints his face like a wolf and who won't kiss you in the moonlight.

Like I said... weird.


	12. Song: Pandora's remedy

_12. Pandora's remedy_

The day is easing to a close and Song sits on the edge of the porch, stretching her leg out in front of her. She reaches out and does her best to grab her flexed foot; she can hook her fingers over the tips of her toes, but barely.

_Hold for ten seconds, then release. Hold for ten seconds..._

Her leg still pains her. The burn scars don't hurt--those are nothing but dead flesh. All they do is sit there and look ugly. It's the damage to the tissue beneath those scars that causes the pain. Muscle tissue was destroyed as well, and other muscles and tendons are strained to compensate. While she doesn't have a limp as such, the end of a hard day's work will find her walking with a hitch in her step. She can already feel a persistent ache in her hip, a grandmother's sort of ache, and here she is not even eighteen.

So, Song does her stretches, and when she's done, she tucks her legs up into a half-lotus, the burned leg resting on the whole one so she can work. When she's ready, she rolls her pants leg up (carefully, so as not to set any wrinkles or creases) and massages a pungent ointment into the warmed and stretched muscles.

The massage hurts nearly as much as the stretching at first, but it fades, and the strong menthol of the ointment stings her nose and clears her mind. The sun is now well past set, but she doesn't get up to light the lamps. It's a clear night, and she can see well enough. Besides, she was on her feet all day, and any little bit of rest she can steal is welcome. The ache in her leg is now something almost pleasant, the feel of a job well done, and a reminder that she is taking proper care of herself.

Pain doesn't go away, not entirely. Well, it _can_, she thinks, but she still hopes that final day is a long way off. In life, pain just changes and transforms over time. Sometimes, it even fades.

The same thing happens with memories. Her memories of the Fire Nation attack on their village were more like waking nightmares for a while. She wouldn't go near open flame, and the smell of cooking (burning) meat would invariably cause her to panic and then throw up everything she had eaten that day. Every night, she used to dream about what happened when the Fire Nation came and took her daddy away, and how she'd torn free of her grandmother's arms and was running after him, screaming his name, and then one of the soldiers casually tossed a fireball at her and laughed and laughed and laughed as if the way screams of grief changed to screams of pain was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.

Song takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes against the memory. Pain never goes away. If she's not careful, she'll start to hear the soldier's mocking laughter rising above the sound of the crickets. If she's not careful, she'll start to think about the rumors of how Earth Nation men are put on the front lines as cannon-fodder, and she'll start to believe them.

Eventually, things got better. Not perfect, but better. Throwing herself into her work may have helped. Then, there was the way the passage of time simply deadened things in its course. Once upon a time, her scars had been so sensitive to heat that she could only bathe in tepid water. Now, though, you could splash her with boiling water and she might not even feel it.

It took her a long time, but she thinks she's found the one thing that will ease the pain of her memories.

It's hope.

Hope that her daddy will return one of these days. Hope that their lands will be free. Hope even helps with the pain in her leg, because if she takes care of herself, she can keep it from becoming a crippling injury.

Yes, it's laughably simple, but so is a splint. So is a bandage. So is using a willow-bark infusion for a headache, or ginger for an upset stomach. In fact, it's often the simplest remedies she turns to first, as they are often the most effective.

She looks out from the porch and thinks of someone she met not long ago, someone who bore the same kind of scars she did, and who had clearly known the same kind of pain. In a way, Song thought his pain was worse than hers, because she could see in the set of his shoulders and hear in the clipped flatness of his voice that he knew nothing of the one simple remedy that had made her own life more bearable.

It is now so dark that she really can't see much beyond the edge of the porch. Even so, she thinks she could just maybe make out the black slash of the old hitching post, now untenanted.

The ache she feels in her heart is not one that will go away any time soon. Still, the old remedy helps a little bit. It may be foolish, but the ache becomes somewhat bearable when she imagines him coming back one day, bringing with him if not their ostrich-horse, then at least an apology. She can always hope.

And then, she hopes, maybe he will sit with her for a while, the way he did before. Just the two of them, out on the porch listening to the crickets as the sun goes down. At last, once the sun sinks below the horizon, he will speak to her in a voice that is no longer so choked with burning despair and he will tell her how he learned to find hope.


	13. Jet: Dulce et Decorum Est

_13. Dulce et Decorum Est_

Jet pretty much expected that he'd die young. It kind of went with the whole freedom fighter thing, you know?

It didn't matter, though. It didn't matter because if he could give his life to take down the Fire Nation and get back the lands the bastards had stolen from the Earth Kingdom, then it would all be worth it. It would be worth every scar, every drop of blood, every agony, every fallen friend.

The Duke used to crow about how they'd be given all sorts of medals and honors once the war was over. Jet indulged him, but honestly, he didn't give a rat-beaver's ass about medals.

He had a cause, and the cause was all. He would give his life a hundred times if it would hurt the Fire nation. A thousand times, even. A million, if he could.

Even when he finally caved and agreed to try living a life of peace in Ba Sing Se with Smellerbee and Longshot, he knew it was only temporary. To him, it was nothing more than a chance to rest and regroup before jumping back in the fray again, meaner and stronger than ever.

Hell, maybe he'd have an opportunity to help push back an attack on the great city herself, holding the line and very likely falling in battle.

As long as his death did the Earth Kingdom some good, he would die happy. Dying peacefully in his sleep was a waste of opportunity, as far as he was concerned.

What he wanted was the last stand and the blaze of glory, the defiant gesture and the overwhelming odds. He would never stop fighting. That's what he wanted, and that's how he always thought it would go.

And in the end, that's exactly how it was going to go, he thought, his gasps for breath drowned out by the sobs Smellerbee couldn't quite choke back. A blaze of glory and a last stand that might buy the Avatar and his friends just enough time to escape. Based on the sheer volume of the footsteps approaching, the odds were as overwhelming as he ever could have wished for. And if Longshot nocking an arrow to his bow wasn't one mother of a defiant gesture, Jet didn't know what was.

It should have been perfect, but it wasn't.

He grabbed Smellerbee's wrist. His legs might not work, but his arms were fine. It took him a minute to find his voice, and when he did, he couldn't tell if it was shaking with laughter or with sheer rage.

"They were supposed to be wearing _red_," he hissed as the cavern filled with a sea of green and then, at the very end, faded to black.

* * *

Author's note: The title comes from the Roman saying, _dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_, roughly translated, "it is sweet and lovely to die for your country." It was often quoted as an inspirational saying at the beginning of World War I. English poet and WWI soldier Wilfred Owen wrote a scathing and harrowing anti-war poem ("Dulce et Decorum Est") that showed how un-lovely war--especially that war--could be. Owen was killed in action a week before the war ended. 


	14. Professor Zei: Time Enough at Last

_14. Time Enough at Last_

Minutes pass. The library shakes and sinks for what feels like forever, then it finally settles to a stop. There are a few final creaks as walls adjust to new stresses, and he hears a few distant, dusty _thumps_. That last is a familiar sound, at least--books and scrolls falling to the ground. Except this time, it's not the fault of clumsy students or overworked and over-tired professors.

Zei's first thought is of the books--hopefully none of the older volumes sustained any damage. It occurs to him that he should be angry about what has happened, but how could he be? How could a man be angry about being trapped in Paradise? He could spend five lifetimes reading and still not be even a fraction of the way through the contents of the Library.

So, now that the library has settled and Wan Shi Tong's shrieks of outrage have faded, he sets off with his armload of books in search of a place to read.

What more could he ask for, he wonders giddily, and while the sloshing of the half-full canteen at his hip gives him a clear and sobering hint, he decides that he will worry about this later.

* * *

Days pass. Zei gorges on books. Memoirs of Earth Kingdom generals and merchant kings. Long, convoluted poetic sagas from the Water Tribes that he suspects are now lost to those very people. Spiritual writings from the Air Nomads that are as much effervescent humor as they are solid wisdom. There are even a few writings from the Fire Nation that managed to escape the sickening fate of their fellows--collections of essays, notes on the cultivation of vineyards, a packet of letters from a high-born lady to a husband-to-be she had never met. These betray a humanity he finds at once enlightening and distressing. 

He reads, and after a while, keeping one ear open for any hint of a vengeful library spirit becomes second nature and hardly any bother at all.

He samples as he might from a buffet at one of the Dean's parties. A volume or two of poetry, journals and collections of letters, biography, history, allegory, essays on religion and essays on reason, books on hunting lore, and elaborate blueprints for the great slides that go swooping across Omashu.

No one bothers him. He hears no sign of Wan Shi Tong, and he is so lost in the raptures of the stacks that it takes him several days to notice that his rations include a few things that were not there before and that his canteen remains inexplicably full.

* * *

Weeks pass. He notices that the foxes are watching him. One night, as he pretends to sleep, he even sees one sneak off with his canteen, only to return an hour or so later, its slender neck straining against the weight of the now full canteen. 

Zei makes a note of this, and decides that at some point he ought to follow the foxes one of these days, in case he needs to find a way out of this place. Just... not at the moment. He's in the middle of an alternate telling of the founding of Omashu, and he's discovered some intriguing parallels to some Air Nomad legends.

The next night, he hears a rustling in his pack, and he sits up just in time to see a flash of white, something that might be the tip of a tail, vanishing behind a carrel. When he checks his pack, he finds a bag of dried apples that he is certain wasn't there the day before. He tries to remember what he _has_ been eating, but draws a blank.

"How typical," he says, voice rough with laughter and disuse. "The prototypical--not to mention stereotypical--absent-minded professor, not even noticing what he's been eating. I could have been eating nails and ground up glass for all I've been paying attention, and oh dear, I'm talking to myself again, aren't I? Mustn't do that, no, mustn't give in."

He's not sure when he's started talking to himself, but now that he's noticed it, he tells himself that he shouldn't let it become a habit. There's no one around to overhear him and think less of his sanity, but there are certain standards one must cling to, after all.

* * *

Months pass. The foxes still tend to him, but he has grown lean on the meager rations they are able to bring. At first he had moved from place to place throughout the library, in an effort to evade the notice of the library's guardian (Zei hears the owl sometimes, or perhaps he mistakes the sound of settling and compacting sand outside the walls for the sound of giant talons scraping across a stone floor) but now he stays in one place, figuring that if the foxes can track him down to bring him food and water, then Wan Shi Tong could as well. 

No longer nomadic, he is now encamped in a small reference room in the north wing of the Library. It's only small by the standards of the Library--it could house the university's entire collection with room to spare--but it practically feels cozy compared to the rest of the place. It has several couches that are reasonably comfortable, if a little too short for him to stretch out on as he sleeps. It also has a large, felt-covered wall with pins for tacking things up; completed portions of his library map live here. Most importantly of all, it has a cabinet full of blank paper and a collection of dictionaries in almost every tongue and dialect imaginable.

"Do you think he even remembers I'm here?" he asks one of the foxes. The fox whines and cocks its head before trotting out of the reference room. They're not much for conversation, but it's better than talking to himself.

"I wonder if Wan Shi Tong would be interested in this translation I'm doing of the Water Tribe _Aningan Saga_. Do you think he'd be interested, or would is he only interested in the original versions? I doubt anyone's ever heard these in a modern tongue." Zei looks through the scrolls that are laid out in neat rows on one of the work tables. "It's nearly all here--all of a work that was thought lost centuries ago. It'll take months to translate properly. I mean, I've got the gist of the story, but to get all the detail, all of the nuance? I can think of dozens of people who would sell everything they had for a chance to read this--it could revolutionize historical scholarship," he says, wishing he was more excited by the prospect. There's something missing, though. Something vital. Something obvious.

"Maybe it's just that I don't have the last volume." He touches the scrolls one by one then rests his hand in mid air where the last scroll should be. "It should detail the reunion of Aningan and Akycha, at least I think it should--but maybe it doesn't, and if it does, there's no guarantee it's a happy one given that more recent legends tend pair the moon spirit with the ocean spirit rather than the sun spirit. Hmm... I wonder..."

He mutters and theorizes to himself, his vow not to talk to himself once more forgotten. His ramblings echo through the Library as he makes his way down to the scrolls.

The scrolls are not light, and they are so old that they are housed on one of the bottommost levels of the library. (There are levels below the level the scrolls are on--he can see over gallery railings down into impossibly deep and low-lit chambers that look more like caves than rooms--but he has no idea how to reach them.) Reading the scrolls where they are housed is not an option; the light is poor and the aisles between the stacks are too narrow for him to comfortably spread out the scroll.

The aisles are, however, wide enough for their owner to pass through freely. Zei has the scroll half-pulled down from its rack when the owl's shriek cuts through the library like the tolling of an iron bell.

"Thief! Defiler!" The feathered neck elongates, and the owl hisses in rage. Zei yelps and falls to the ground, pulling the heavy scroll down on top of him.

The owl's beak clatters with fury as he draws back his head to strike. Zei knows it will only take one blow to tear him in two. He pushes the scroll away from him instinctively, to keep it from being damaged.

"Please! No!" His voice is startlingly loud in his own ears.

The great head pauses, and eyes blink slowly.

"Why should I spare you, little thief?"

Zei reaches out for the scroll again (he does not dispute the label of 'thief'), and pulls it in tight to his chest, not as a shield, but more as a child might clutch a stuffed toy for protection against a nightmare. Even if he could get to his feet in time, Zei knows he stands no chance of running away. He is underfed and weak. His heart hammers and his breath doesn't seem to reach his lungs. The owl's question is largely rhetorical, but Zei can't help answering in a voice so small that the sound of it doesn't even echo in the cavernous space. "I... I don't know how it ends. Please--I just want to know how it ends."

He closes his eyes. He waits for the death-blow.

And waits.

Eventually, he opens his eyes.

* * *

Years pass. None of his former colleagues would recognize him. He is not even sure he would recognize himself. 

Time underground has changed him. He is not the man he used to be, no, not at all.

"I know what was missing," he says without preamble. "I know what was it was I was looking for, that day I went out to look for the last _Aningan_ scroll. And I know why you let me live. I think the foxes figured it out, long before I did."

As if summoned by Zei's casual mention, a fox dashes into the Great Hall of the library, a small tube clenched between its teeth. When it reaches the center of the hall, it pauses and whines, unsure of what to do next.

Zei reaches for the tube, but Wan Shi Tong is faster. He snaps it up and tips out a small scroll.

"Watch yourself, thief," he says, and Zei laughs at the old joke. It is two jokes at once--a reference both to the old meaning behind the name 'Zei,' and to a past accusation.

"What is it?" Zei asks, and the old owl blinks slowly. He read the scroll in an instant, but as usual, draws things out before answering.

"More human nonsense," he says. "The larger wars are over, but smaller wars keep cropping up to take their place. Balance seems to be returning, though. Perhaps one day we shall have some new writings from the re-founded Air Temples."

Zei inclines his head and blinks slowly in acknowledgement. "Good. That will be very good."

Perhaps one day they will raise the library again, but it is still too early to broach that particular subject. Wan Shi Tong has declared that no humans are allowed in the library, and he is still adamant on that point, as Zei well knows.

Wan Shi Tong tucks the paper under his wing. It disappears and will eventually reappear in its proper place in the library.

Zei is beginning to understand how this works. He is beginning to understand a lot of things.

"I am glad you figured out what you were missing," Wan Shi Tong says, returning to Zei's earlier comment. Their conversations jump around like this, with one of them sometimes returning abruptly to a comment the other made days earlier. "And I should hope it's obvious why I let you live."

"Live, yes, but not as I was," Zei says, blinking his eyes in a rather pointed manner, but there is no reprimand. How could he be angry about what happened?

Wan Shi Tong ruffles his wings as a man might adjust his collar out of embarrassment. "It was necessary," he says awkwardly, "but enough of that. I think you are now ready to see the oldest parts of the library. Follow me."

The two of them head downstairs, climbing down for hours until they reach the gallery that overlooks the caves beneath the library. The floor is nearly a hundred feet down, but there are no stairs into that part of the library. There is only one way down, and only one way back up.

"There are stone tablets down there--the very first laws ever set down, along with the very first story," he says, and the enthusiasm in the old spirit's voice is infectious, "and far in, miles deep in the farthest chambers of all, the very first writing ever is inscribed in the walls of the cave. Would you like to see it?"

There is no need for an answer. Shutting the library off from the world was not a decision Wan Shi Tong made lightly. Zei knows that, now. He had been missing the same thing that Zei was, shut away as they were in what should have been a paradise of knowledge.

Zei hops up on the edge of the railing. "I thought you'd never ask."

A like mind, someone to argue with, to talk to until late at night, idea piling upon idea and sentences spinning out into bright and giddy spirals. Spirited debates that weren't about proving oneself right or wrong, but about building a logical structure that took on a beauty of its own. The reading of favorite passages, and seeing afresh the beauty of a poem through someone else's eyes.

"Let's go."

Zei closes his eyes and jumps. His wings spread and catch the air for the first time as Wan Shi Tong follows close behind him, and the two owls spiral down into the depths of the Library.


	15. Aunt Wu, Meng: Three Fates

_15. Three Fates_

"Do you _really_ think I'll find my one true love, Aunt Wu?" Poor Meng was doing her best not to sound mournful, but she couldn't keep her voice from going wobbly around the edges, or the dishes on her tray from rattling a bit more than usual as she set it down.

Aunt Wu poured a cup of tea and passed it to Meng, who blinked a few times then took it as if she had no idea what it was or why Aunt Wu was giving it to her. Aunt Wu flapped one hand slightly, signaling the girl to sit on one of the nearby cushions. It was time for another talk.

"It's like I told you, Meng, dear," she said once the girl was seated. The words were (she hoped) comforting and familiar. "You'll meet your special someone when the time is right."

Meng pouted. It was not a flattering look for her, but Aunt Wu had found that telling her to smile generally produced a frightening, desperate rictus.

"It will be a while yet, so don't you frown, dear heart," Aunt Wu said. That sometimes produced better results than a direct order to smile. She reached out and stroked one of Meng's frizzy ponytails. She did not, however, attempt to smooth it. "Remember--when the time is right. No sooner than that, and certainly no later."

Meng didn't _quite_ swat Aunt Wu's hand away from her hair; she was much too respectful than that. But the instant Aunt Wu withdrew her hand, Meng poked at her hair as if she were prodding a wound to see if it was still sore.

"Aunt Wu, do you... I mean..." Meng's voice trailed off, and she looked up to Aunt Wu for help and permission.

Aunt Wu had been expecting something like this for the past few days, ever since the Avatar and his friends left. Most people had been quick to see the averted disaster as another proof of her amazing foresight, but Meng had proven to be surprisingly thoughtful about such things.

"What is it, dear? You can ask me anything, you know that."

She had her answer prepared, had had it prepared for two days now.

"If... well, you're so good at telling fortunes, why don't you have your one true love, Aunt Wu? Why couldn't your fortunetelling tell you where to find him?"

Unfortunately, the answer she had prepared was not for that question.

"Well..." Aunt Wu looked down into the surface of her tea, but instead of showing her the future it threatened to show her the past.

There were times when Aunt Wu wondered if she had steered Meng wrong, by talking about special someones and true loves.

No matter what people in the village chose to believe, Aunt Wu had never been able to see _the_ future. No one could.

What she _could_ see were glimpses of dozens of potential and often contradictory futures.

In Meng's case, Aunt Wu could see three possible futures.

"A long time ago--but not _that_ long," she said, giving Meng a mischievous wink and getting a flicker of a smile in return, "I could have had my pick of young men. Sometimes it seemed as if there were dozens of them, all of them following after me, some bringing flowers and asking me for dates, others just hanging back at the edge of the crowd, hoping for a kind word or a smile that was for them and them alone."

In one possible future, Meng grew old and grew lonely. She was the homely old woman in a homely old house on the edge of town. Children would dare each other to sneak into her back yard, finding it a sign of bravery to risk the wrath of the old witch how lived by the woods. But Meng was no witch. She took in laundry and mending, did odd chores, and spent a lot of time looking in the mirror and wondering what life would have been like if only she had been prettier, if only she had been worthy of someone's love.

"It drove all of the other girls in the village absolutely wild with jealousy," Aunt Wu said. Even now, it was hard not to feel sweet, warm smugness fill her heart at the thought. "'What's so special about her?' they asked. 'Wu isn't the prettiest girl in the village. Her father's not the richest. She doesn't have the nicest clothes or the daintiest manners.' Oh, you should have heard them--they sounded like a bunch of chickens squawking."

Meng giggled, and it didn't take a fortuneteller to know that she was picturing sour and jealous looks on the faces of certain girls within their own village.

"What I did have was a very nice smile, or so I was told. One very much like yours, my dear."

Now _that_ got a smile, a brilliant one.

In another possible future, Meng rarely smiled. She was married, yes, and she had three children, but she also had little to smile about. Neither did her husband. When two people are desperate to be married for no other reason than to be married, they usually find that marriage in and of itself is no admirable goal. When Meng's children finally left home, they left as if they were captives fleeing from prison. But for Meng, there was no escape.

"I think, though," she said, tapping at the corner of her mouth as she gazed up at the ceiling, "that it wasn't just the smile."

This was not the sort of thing that was easy to explain to an eleven-year-old, or to anyone, really. Either you understood it deep in your heart or you didn't.

"So what was it, Aunt Wu?" Meng was leaning so far forward that she was practically balancing on her knees. "How did you get all those boys to follow you around? And did you ever pick one of them? How did you know which one to pick?"

She reached out again to stroke Meng's hair, and this time the gesture was accepted.

"So many questions," she said gently, and with no trace of criticism. "Such a curious, clever girl. No, no I don't mind that you ask. I did eventually pick one of those boys, and as for how I knew, well, it was easier to know who was the right one than to know who all the wrong ones were. One of these days, I'll tell you the whole story."

Not today, though. Today, she wanted Meng to smile. Tales of a love lost too early could wait for another time. So close to her own disappointment, Meng would only find melancholy to be bitter.

"As for what it was that got them to follow me?" She smiled at her young protégé. Ah, as for that...

There was a third possible future. She saw a laughing Meng, tall (too tall, some would say), strong-limbed and strong featured (too strong, others would say), striding across the village square, casting a merry look over her shoulder. Her stiff, frizzy hair may not have flowed in the breeze, but swept back and adorned with a gold ribbon, it was as magnificent as a queen's headdress. Three boys stood by the fountain she had just passed. Two were gawking in amazement, and the third had just set his jaw in frightened determination (he would speak to her, yes he would, he would screw up his courage and tell her what he felt). She was not the prettiest girl in the village, or even pretty at all by any traditional definition, but almost everyone who saw her remembered her as beautiful.

"You'll learn that in time, I'm sure of it, my sweet, my clever Meng."

The pout she receive in response to that remark was far more attractive than the earlier one. In time, it would become devastating.

"Not long, now. You'll figure it out, and when you do and when the time comes, you'll find a man who is truly special and truly worthy of your love. It may take a while, because someone like that is going to be hard to find, so be patient."

Meng nodded, and Aunt Wu didn't think that she was just imagining things when she saw that the girl was holding her head a little higher.

Then, Meng cocked her head to one side, quizzically.

"Will he have big ears like you said?"

Aunt Wu blinked, then remembered what she had once foretold in an attempt to instill hope in a Meng who at the time could believe only in her own homeliness. She started laughing.

"Perhaps, Meng. Perhaps."

Meng had three possible futures. Two of them, though, were starting to fade, just a little. The miserable mother and the lonely crone had begun their retreat from the edges of Aunt Wu's foresight, while the brilliant young maiden was confidently walking forward, laughing, hips swaying, to take her proper place. And now Aunt Wu thought she could see dozens of possible futures trailing in the maiden's wake--the proud and doting mother, the great-grandmother who was the beloved center of a sprawling family, a self-assured young woman who had gladly put aside thoughts of marriage while she pursued other dreams, and so many, many more.

And in the end, that was what fortunetelling was about, wasn't it?

Aunt Wu's real work had nothing to do with sentencing people to some immutable, unavoidable fate.

No, her real work had everything to do with guiding people to the best possible futures.


	16. Aang: Flying Sorcery

Author's note: This takes place in the first season, probably shortly after their visit to Omashu. The title is taken from a song by Al Stewart - very much worth checking out if you have the chance.

* * *

_16. Flying Sorcery_

A shadow races over the flock of birds. They scatter and wheel, thinking _hawk_, but the sound above them is bubbling laughter, not the cruel shriek of the predator.

Aang swoops down and above the vineyards, watching his shadow grow and fade, grow and fade, as the wind carries him along the rolling countryside. A flick of the glider's wing, and he rises again. Perhaps he rises with the wind, or perhaps he bends it to his will, but it has always been hard for him to tell the difference.

Up, up, up, backlit by the setting sun, down, down, down, veering across Appa's path and then on, on, on, grinning as the bison's startled bellow and Sokka's impressive streak of cursing dwindle away behind him.

Bank, turn, drop, rise. Ride the thermal, feel the bending of the air in the pull of the glider against his arms.

Aang veers around and hovers over Appa's saddle just long enough to point at a cloud, a glimmering mountain of gold and red in the late afternoon light, and shout out _look at it, all piled up like that, it looks like the city of Omashu, doesn't it, Katara, doesn't it?_ before pulling up and away again. Up and away to where the air is so thin he has to bend it around and under himself to stay aloft. This far up, he can even see a few pinpricks of starlight. But he can't stay there for very long, so he dives back down to fly alongside the others. He wheels off to chase a bird or maybe his own shadow, but he always returns.

They're going to land for the night pretty soon. Katara is calling after him, and Aang is--for now--pretending not to hear her. When Appa gives him a longsuffering look and starts drifting downwards, or perhaps when Momo starts circling his head and chittering at him in a tone that means _food now and rest_, Aang will lean and swoop in a lazy curve to rejoin the others.

He'll land with a flourish, running a few steps to compensate for how unsteady he feels on too-solid ground. He's talking the moment he lands, asking his friends if they saw the farm with the funny red windmill, or if they noticed how the leaves were already turning gold and yellow and bright flame orange.

It's good to be with his friends. The three of them talk until well after dark. They rest up against Appa's flanks, and in the warm lee of the bison's massive form even Aang sometimes has a hard time believing that Appa can fly. It's a time when they can plot their course for the next day, and argue over how long to stay in camp the next morning to work on Aang's waterbending lessons. It's a time for them to be grounded, rooted. It's a time when he can tell them about how much he misses a life that is now a hundred years out of reach, and he can confide in them about how he doesn't know if he'll be ready for a future that seems all too close (and if only he could reverse the positions of future and past, if only, if only...)

The next day, he'll ride with Sokka and Katara a bit before taking to the air again. The sky is the same as it was a hundred years ago (_bank and whirl, swoop and dive, back to where he was a moment before_), and the same as it will be a month from now (_circle and soar, round and round and round again_). The stars are the same, and the sun, and the moon. From high enough up, from far enough away (_rise and rise and rise until there is only air and the unchanging stars above_) the earth of a hundred years ago is the earth of today is the earth of tomorrow (_he moves the air and the air moves him_) and in the flying there is only the now and the always and the forever.


	17. Haru: Child's Play

_17. Child's play_

By the time he was seven, Haru knew all the unspoken rules of his village.

When the Fire Nation soldiers came by, you stopped talking. When they looked at you, you kept your eyes averted and your head down. If one of them asked you a question, you answered, and answered respectfully, but that was it. You never mentioned the people who had gone missing. You never talked about earthbending. You never did anything to make yourself stand out.

But sometimes, if you thought you could get away with it, you stuck your tongue out at them when their backs were turned.

From time to time, Haru and some of the other young boys in the village would gather in their ramshackle fortress in the woods and talk in not-quite-whispers about how they would learn earthbending and bury those Fire Nation soldiers under tons and tons of rock. It was only play--none was older than eight, and none of them knew how to earthbend. Despite all the brave talk, when the shadows began to lengthen, and they finally returned to the village and their chores, Haru and his friends kept their heads down and their eyes averted just like everyone else (unless, of course, no one was looking).

It was all well and good to talk about adventure and impossible deeds. One day, though, the whispers became something different, and they haunted Haru as he walked back to the village. It was nowhere near sunset, but Haru was already halfway back to the village.

The others had called after him as he left, but just before he passed out of earshot, Haru heard Jaka tell the other boys to "leave him alone--he's thinkin' about his dad, okay?"

Before Haru had known what was happening, his friends' talk had gone from glorious bragging about what it would be like to kick the soldiers out of the village to what it would be like to see all the earthbenders coming home again. To see his dad coming home again.

When he got back to the village proper and saw the soldier standing guard in the middle of the village square, Haru could not make himself avert his eyes or keep his head down, and that scared him as much as the soldier did. He stopped cold, rooted in place by his desire to hurt this man, even though it would do nothing to bring his father back, even though it would only make things worse.

His fist clenched, and then something odd happened. Along with his fist, his mind also clenched, and clenched _hard_. It had never happened before, but it felt natural, and it felt right.

The next thing Haru knew, he felt the satisfying _thwack_ of impact--from twelve yards away.

The instant Haru felt that impact, the soldier clapped his hand to the back of his neck and jumped two feet straight into the air, yelping as if he'd been stung. Haru clapped a hand to his mouth to muffle a startled, delighted laugh. When the soldier landed, he wheeled around to see who had dared to attack one of the Fire Lord's men.

There was no one there; nothing but a bucket of coal. Haru was all the way on the other side of the square.

"Who did that? If you saw who did that, speak up!" The soldier looked around sharply, lips curled, nostrils flared. The air around his hands rippled with barely restrained heat.

Haru didn't feel like laughing any more.

"Well?"

No one spoke. People just looked at each other, wondering who would be the first to cast blame on a neighbor in order to save himself. It would not be the first time.

Haru bit his lips together so hard he could taste blood. If he said anything he would be taken away, but if he said nothing, someone else would be taken, because that's what the Fire Nation soldiers did. They didn't care if they punished the wrong people. This wasn't just some game.

He took a deep breath. He tried to think of what his mother would want him to do. He tried not to think of how much it hurt when he had burned himself on the cooking fire. "It was--"

He thought his knees would buckle when another soldier came running up, his words about "important message" and "new request from the Warden" drowning out Haru's pitiful confession.

Once the two soldiers had left, Haru ran into the closest alley and threw up.

After a while, the heaves stopped. He stayed there on his knees for a moment, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand, while he leaned on the other, fingers digging into the dry, dusty earth. He could feel the earth, he could feel it waiting. He knew it was waiting for him to learn all its unspoken rules, and that standing strong was much more than just a child's game.

_Well_, Haru thought as he slowly and shakily got back onto his feet, _it's a very good thing the earth is patient_.


	18. Bato: Souvenir

_18. Souvenir_

You look around you and there are so many things that should remind you of home, but don't. When Hakoda and the others left, they made sure you had what you needed to remember who you were and where you came from. Various artifacts, large and small have been hung around your shelter with a careful eye as to placement. There is a mask just like _that_ one on your wall at home, in pretty much the same place. Your stash of weapons--some practical, some not--are ready to hand just as they were on the boat coming up here. You even have some of the right food, carefully preserved and jealously rationed. The pelts are the same, as are the clothes, the tools, the robes.

But the walls they hang on and the floor they lie on are made of warm and yellow stone, not pale and shimmering ice. Things that should look familiar are made strange by their new context. They remind you that you're not where you're supposed to be. They make you wonder if you really remember what home is like, and if they will now look strange when you see them against the whiteness of ice.

Other things, though, do remind you of home. They remind you of home because they only serve to underscore that this place is very much _not_ home.

The steadiness of the land tells you that you are not at sea. The quiet voices of the women from the abbey are nothing like the raucous, familiar voices of the men of your tribe. The sound that lulls you to sleep every night is that of crickets, not of waves lapping against the side of your ship.

At least you're not lonely. The sisters at the abbey are kind, and you suspect you will miss some of them when it is finally time to leave. You should have died from your wounds, but they somehow managed to patch you back together. They were skilled enough and patient enough that you still have the use of your left arm, something you'd thought was impossible at first. (You are certain that when you think of this place, this time, you will always remember the pressure of strong, gentle hands, the warmth of the ointment that burns and cools at the same time, the damp weight of the bandages. The soft smell of roses, the sharp smell of mint, the smoky smell of sage, the earthy smell of vetiver, and the fresh smell of bergamot--these surround you and drown out all other smells, including your memory of the smell of the sea.)

When two children of your tribe unexpectedly show up, it's like a little bit of home arriving. It's a chance to revisit the old stories, tell the old jokes, and live the old ways. It all comes to life again, and you would swear that it was just yesterday that you and Hakoda pulled that prank on old Kanna, that's how fresh the memory feels. For a moment, the smell of the sea rises up over the smell of roses.

The only problem is, the Sokka and Katara you meet are not the Sokka and Katara you remember. They have grown, and grown strong. Their travels have changed them as yours have changed you. They remind you that things are no longer the same, and that things will never be the same, and that the home you return to is no longer be the home you left, just as the home you left was no longer the home you knew as a child.

Eventually, it comes time to leave. You say your goodbyes and set sail down the river that will lead you to your people. In time, you can smell the sea on the evening breeze, and something within you soars.

But still, when you set anchor for the night and stretch out on your pelt, you are enrobed in the scents of the abbey that have permeated deep into the fur, and part of you hopes you will always be able to remember the soft smell of roses, the sharp smell of mint...


	19. Suki: either or

Note: This is a companion piece to chapter 11, "both/and"

* * *

_19. either/or_

Let me tell you something--you have no idea how mad I was when you implied that because I was a woman, I couldn't be a warrior. But you also have no idea how glad I was to see that you could change your mind, and that you could see I could be both.

And no, the reason I'm glad has nothing to do with the fact that the first thing I thought when I saw you was 'nice butt.' I'm really starting to wish I'd never told you that.

You see--getting back to my original point because we can talk about your butt _later_--there was part of me that used to think the way you did: how can I be a girl _and_ a warrior? Yes... you're right. Kiyoshi Island has traditionally been defended by a female army since the days of Avatar Kiyoshi herself. I should have realized I was being silly, but...

You haven't met them--yet--but two of the most important people in my life are my mother and my Auntie Kiku. I love them both, I love them both very, very much, but...

They're just so different, and for the longest time, I couldn't wrap my head around it, the fact that they're sisters. It just seemed impossible.

Auntie Kiku is tough, and she _loves_ to fight. In fact, over the years she's managed to get herself banned from nearly every tavern on the island--some of them twice. She still trains the junior warriors, and she's so demanding and so... _loud_ that all the apprentices dread the idea of studying under her. But when they do... You're exactly right. They all end up loving her. They always do.

And watching her fight? Seeing her in that uniform, seeing her wield her fans as if they had always been a part of her? It's like watching a wolf-lioness on the hunt. Breathtaking. Frightening. Gorgeous.

Oh, I can't tell you how often I wished I could _be_ her! I wanted so much to be taller and stronger, to grow six inches in as many days just so I could be more like her. She always told me I could be the strongest warrior in the village if I just tried hard enough. And I believed her.

On the other hand, there's my mother. So kind, so gentle, so elegant. So beautiful. I swear half the village is in love with her--even boys your age stop to watch when she goes by. She always gives the best hugs, all soft and sweet-smelling and when her cheek brushes against mine, it's like touching velvet--and somehow, she always manages not to get my makeup smeared all over her.

I mean, even if you just look at the way she moves... It's nothing like Auntie Kiku. She walks so delicately, so precisely, just like a little cat, all neat and perfectly groomed. Whenever I picture her, I see her curled up with a book on the window-seat in our house, so relaxed but still so elegant, and when she looks up, she has the most brilliant smile and she tells me to go get us some tea and come sit down for a while, just the two of us girls, together. But anyhow, while there was a part of me that wanted to be that fierce warrior, that lioness, there was also part of me that very much wanted to be that pampered housecat. I wanted to be soft and ladylike and to surround myself with beautiful things. So, when I wasn't wishing I was taller and stronger, I was wishing that I could be smaller and daintier and more refined. I know... silly.

But silly or not, there was a time when I didn't know who I was supposed to be--the lady or the warrior.

Now if you laugh at this next part, I promise I will show you exactly how dainty and gentle I am _not_ when you're being a dork.

One night, not long before I was going to be formally inducted as one of Kiyoshi's warriors, I had a dream--and by the way, rolling your eyes counts as laughing. Just so you know.

Anyhow, I was standing in the middle of the village square, right by the statue of Avatar Kiyoshi herself. There were two animals at her feet: a wolf-lioness, and a little, bitty kitten.

And no, Sokka, I don't know why the lioness didn't eat the kitten! You _do_ know that being a smartass is as bad if not worse than laughing or rolling your eyes, right? Now, back to what I was saying:

The lioness looked up at me, and all of a sudden there was a cub nestled between her paws. She gave me this look, as if she was trying to tell me something, and then she turned back to her cub and started washing it. Her eyes were closed, and I think she was purring. Then, it was the kitten's turn. She turned to me, and its eyes were hard and focused, not at all fuddled and confused like kittens' eyes normally are. It growled at me, low and deep in its throat, and I knew that if I so much as touched it, I'd be bleeding.

And then, things got weird, like they do in dreams. The kitten was still the kitten, but it my mother from when I was five. She was standing at the door with a pitchfork in hand, jaw set and telling the two bandits standing outside that if they wanted to rob us, they would have to go through her. And the lioness was still the lioness, but it was also Auntie Kiku, kneeling by a novice student who had just broken her wrist, and she was holding the girl to her and stroking her hair so, so gently and telling her it was okay, it was okay, the healer would be there soon.

"Why do you think you have to choose?" someone asked, and I knew it was Kiyoshi. And... you're not laughing, are you? No, you probably know more about the Avatar thing than I do, so no, you know this isn't funny at all. I still can't believe that you got to see her, and I didn't, you dork. Well, at least I got to see her in my dreams.

Anyhow, she wasn't done. I didn't even have a chance to answer before she said:

"You do see that these creatures are the same, do you not, even though you would think they were opposites? The lion is a cat when it needs to be a cat, and the cat is a lion when it needs to be a lion."

I don't know why I never realized it before, but at that moment I finally noticed that even though Avatar Kiyoshi was born an earthbender, she's best known for using fans--an airbender weapon.

"You are a warrior when you need to be a warrior," she said, and the earth shook. "You are a lady when you need to be a lady," and the wind nearly knocked me off my feet.

Yup--you got it in one. That's when I woke up. And maybe it sounds silly, but I felt as if a burden had been lifted from me. The answer to who I was supposed to be was simple--I could be whoever I wanted or needed to be. I could get bruised and battered in practice with Auntie Kiku, and I could curl up on the window seat and gossip with my mother.

There's no reason I can't do both. Or either. It all depends on what I need. Or what I want.

And right now, what this lady wants is for you to come a little bit closer.

_Mrrrowr..._


	20. Hahn: Pieces of me you've never seen

_20. pieces of me you've never seen_

Just before he hit the water like a sack full of bait, Hahn realized that his plan to take the Fire Nation ship by surprise had perhaps not been as well thought out as it could have been.

What happened after that wasn't very clear, but he did remember thinking, as he bobbed in the waves, drifting towards unconsciousness and hoping against hope that someone managed to find him before he drowned, that things had gone awfully dark all of a sudden.

Some time later, he woke up in the infirmary. He was rather pleased with himself for not drowning, so at first he didn't understand why everyone kept telling him how sorry they were. Maybe it was the aftereffects of the concussion, or maybe it was the lingering shock from the hypothermia, but it took him a lot longer than it should have to realize what they were talking about: his fiancée was dead.

Yue was dead. What was he supposed to say to that? That he was sorry, too? Probably. Hahn was not exactly known for being self-aware, but he had a vague notion that people were expecting him to be broken, inconsolable, a wreck, a ruin. Yes, utter collapse would have been the seemly reaction under the circumstances, but instead he just found that he was more confused and curious than anything else.

Much of his bemusement had to do with some things about the moon, and some fish, and some other things that just didn't make any sense, but he was also plagued by the notion that he had missed some vital clue, some essential fact he had failed to think through the way he had failed to think things through when infiltrating that Fire Nation ship.

In time, perhaps, he might figure out what that something was. Maybe he would also figure out what he was supposed to feel about all of this. In the meantime, it was probably in his best interest to remain silent. And if people mistook his silence for grieving, then so much the better.

Over the next several days, Yue's friends (he had no idea she'd had so _many_) continued to stop by, 'just to see how you're holding up'--or so they said. Truth be told, they really didn't seem to be too interested in Hahn, or how he was feeling, or how well his recovery was going.

Instead, all they wanted to talk about was Yue. They insisted on telling him about trivial things she had said, or pointless little kindnesses she'd bestowed. They spoke to him of times shared, and about the way her smile would show first in her eyes and then in her mouth.

At first, he found this to be highly annoying. Weren't they supposed to be asking after him, and how he was doing? But no--they insisted on telling him about her favorite foods and her favorite books, or about rare flashes of temper that he'd never seen for himself, or a surprisingly sly wit that he'd never even suspected was there.

And then, when someone inevitably cut off in the middle of some story about a childhood pet or a cooking misadventure, half-laughing, half-crying, and chiding themselves for telling him a story he'd no doubt heard hundreds of times before, he surprised himself by asking them to continue.

He even found himself asking people to repeat certain stories two, three, and even four times. After a while, he could almost believe he had been there to see the Great Cake Disaster for himself, or that he had been the one of the people she'd confided in when she was tired of being strong and composed after her mother's death. Bit by bit, all the little details and anecdotes, all the assorted facts and trivia began to piece themselves together into a portrait of someone Hahn was beginning to think he would have liked very much indeed.

Inevitably, though, Hahn's visitors would ask him to share stories of his time with Yue. When that happened, all he could do was turn his face to the wall and tell them that he was tired, and besides, he wasn't really wasn't ready to talk about it--not now, and possibly not ever.

"We know," they would say, smiling at him as they might at a dying man or a congenital idiot. "We miss her, too." And then they would look out at the rising moon with such longing that he felt very small and very uncomfortable, and he wished they would just leave already.

And once his visitors had gone, leaving behind a few sympathetic platitudes on their way out, Hahn would look out his window at the rising moon and wonder what it was they hoped to see there, and if it was possible to miss somebody he'd never really met.


	21. Ty Lee: Dancing on a Wire

Author's Note: This was one of my more experimental pieces, style-wise. I think it (mostly) worked, but I also think it would have been impossible to sustain for more than this short snippet. Oh, well. At least next up you get a nice, long, plotty thing featuring King Bumi.

* * *

_21. Dancing on a wire_

Up is down and down is up and back is forth and round and round and round she goes. Cartwheeling down halls, cartwheeling down stairs. She cartwheels past teachers and threats of detention. She's upside-down and downside-up, skirt 'round her head, hands on the floor and heels in the air.

Heels in the air, she's dancing on her hands. She's ignoring gravity, she's ignoring detention. Ty Lee's in trouble again, yes Ty Lee's in trouble, but Ty Lee doesn't care. She doesn't care because her aura is pink today, pink against Mai, who is graygraygray, and pink against Azula with her coldfireblue.

(And to think about Azula is to dream about dancing on a wire and she's got to keep moving, got to keep from falling, can't think of falling, can't stop, can't ever stop, and the wire cuts into her feet.)

Back bows, braid whips, hands slap against stone. Her laughter spins out, turning the world pink. She's failed history again, she's drawn flowers on her test, chains of five-petaled daisies looping round and round the names of Fire Lords past.

Handsprings carry her away from history tests. They carry her away from her parents' dreams of a good marriage and a demure daughter, a dutiful daughter, a daughter with her heels on the ground and her head out of the clouds.

Heels in the air, and Ty Lee's gone away, she's cutting school, she's off the grounds and out of bounds. She's past the guards, knocking them down with a _tip-tap-tap_, cutting their chi and cutting her apron strings.

She's running away. She's joining the circus today, this very day, this pinkest of days.

She's joining the circus and she'll dance on a wire, up and down and down and up, back and forth and to and fro, always moving, never stopping. She follows her dream and a dream follows her, coldfireblue burning, flickering at her heels, and part of her knows she'll forever be dancing on a wire, even when her feet are firm on the ground.


	22. King Bumi: The Long Game

Author's note: If you're familiar with the new seasons of Doctor Who, you may recognize the title of this piece. And yes, it is a shout-out to the Long Game/Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways set of episodes.

* * *

_22. The Long Game_

King Bumi often liked to speak of 'thinking outside the box.' What most people never realized, however, was that getting outside the box was simply the _start_. You had to keep on going, keep on dodging and wriggling and looking for new ways through and new ways around, until you finally managed to get yourself outside the outside. And you didn't stop there. You kept on going from outside to outside until eventually you went so far that outside came back around to inside, and you found yourself back inside the box with a new understanding of how the whole thing--the box, and everything in it and outside it--worked.

Therefore, although he was locked away and suspended in a small metal coffin, King Bumi was in a very real sense the freest man in the entire city of Omashu, and perhaps in the entire Earth Kingdom. He had no commitments. He had no appointments. He had no responsibilities.

He had nothing to do but think, and so he thought, and he waited, and he fought entire wars--past and future--in the wide open plains of his mind.

His attention went first to the future wars. Yes, those would be difficult, he thought as he deliberately placed mental Pai Sho tiles on an imaginary field that was at once a game board and a richly detailed map of the world. A stylized comet hung in the sky, still far off but racing closer and closer every day. A symbol of the moon hung poised to move in front of a picture of the sun. Yes, Bumi knew about these things, and he knew that Aang knew about them as well. His old friend would figure out what to do. Bumi nodded in satisfaction. His tests had proven that the boy had the necessary flexibility of mind and resilience of spirit.

King Bumi just hoped Aang would figure out in time that beating back the Fire Nation was--like thinking outside the box--simply the start.

The mental counters moved, the board was rearranged, and the Fire Nation was defeated. The balance of the board shifted and for a while, all the colors were in balance. Bumi could even see room for the Air Nomads in there, assuming any had survived. He had played the game to this point many times before, arriving here by dozens of different routes.

He studied the board and frowned. Yes, the next moves would be tricky indeed, but he had placed his tiles well, and the patterns he had set years ago were still in force. With a flick of his mind, he journeyed to another spot on his mental map, a place over thirty years in the past, when the Fire Nation armies were poised on the edge of retreat outside the walls of Omashu. Under other circumstances, they would already be breaking camp and preparing to leave, but Bumi had something they dared not leave without.

_"In a good game of Pai Sho, the key is to achieve balance," Bumi told his guest. "Yes, you want to win, but there's winning and then there's_ winning_."_

_The young man on the opposite side of the board looked at him askance. Perhaps it was due to Bumi's mismatched eyes; they always made people uneasy. Perhaps it was because the young man's legs were shackled and one arm was cuffed to his chair. Perhaps it was because of the speed and ruthlessness with which his free hand had been encased in stone the instant he tried firebending. Or perhaps it was because instead of using the stone to crush that hand as an object lesson, his captor freed him and then gently placed a game tile in his palm._

_"Oh, don't give me that look, you young whippersnapper. I'm doing you a huge favor even though you don't know it yet."_

_The next series of moves--both on the board and with the prisoner sitting opposite him--would prove to be crucial. The cut of the man's uniform proclaimed him to be a lieutenant, but his true importance had nothing to do with his military rank. Mere lieutenants did not have custom-tailored uniforms with fittings of real gold._

_Arrogance radiated off the young nobleman like heat shimmer, and the tile in his hand darkened around the edges. "How long do you intend to keep me here?"_

_"Until you've learned how to play the game," Bumi said, spreading his hands wide to indicate the board in front of them, or perhaps the whole world around them. "Or until I've decided that you're not worth teaching."_

_"At which point you'll have me killed, and have my head placed on a pike on top of your city gates." The tone betrayed traces of the wry sense of humor that Bumi had suspected was there. "I assume you know who I am?"_

_"Of course I know who you are. You're a fast learner, that's who you are." Bumi's eyes glinted with mischief. "I like that. Keep it up, and maybe you'll get out of here alive."_

_One move down: many, many more to go._

Decades later, Bumi watched as green and blue counters filled not only their proper places, but started to push beyond those places, pushing back at and overwhelming the red.

"Grudges are a powerful thing, Aang," Bumi said as if his old-young friend were in fact there. While Bumi had gambled on an Avatar--_any_ Avatar--being there for this stage of the end-game, Aang's return had been an unhoped-for blessing. Bumi didn't have to guess about the way the boy thought, or felt. "I'm a hundred and twelve, and believe me, I know how long they last. Longer than I could ever hope to, that's for certain."

The Avatar's job was to maintain balance. Yes, the board had to be put back into equilibrium, but it also had to be _kept_ there, and that would be the tricky part. Things had to be put back where they belonged, and there were few in the Earth Kingdom who would argue that point. Unfortunately, calls for reparation had a nasty habit of turning into cries for revenge.

But Aang had readily accepted the idea of neutral _jing_, and that was a good start. It would help him to understand that it was often far more difficult to be soft than to be hard.

_The young man extended his free hand (the other remained shackled, naturally) and made another move. It was a good one, but Bumi countered it with the White Lotus tile in a move that seemed innocuous or even pointless. He waited, but not for as long as he expected._

_"You just won," the prisoner said, disbelievingly. He didn't even bother to place his next tile._

_"What do you mean I've just won?" Bumi snapped. They'd been playing every night for the past three weeks, the king and his prisoner. Playing, and talking. The arrogance was still there in full force, but Bumi had unearthed a long-neglected child-like curiosity and sense of whimsy that were responding well--if slowly--to some careful nurturing. Sometimes, Bumi wondered if the other man knew just how many games were truly being played here. "How could I have won? We've only made three moves each?"_

_Quietly, the Fire Nation officer traced out the next ten or so moves, placing his tiles and Bumi's in turn, pausing only occasionally to second-guess the placement of a tile. "It could go a few different ways, depending if you moved _here_ instead of _here_, or if I captured your Wheel instead of your Spear," he said, thinking it out as he spoke, "but the results are all very, very similar--whether I like it or not, you've got me boxed in."_

_He seemed to accept his loss graciously, unlike the first few times they played. Bumi's advisors had been quick to write off the broad-featured, thick fingered noble as an idiot who'd been given his officer's commission solely due to his pedigree. Just another Fire Nation thug, they said, but one who could be a valuable bargaining chip. Bumi, on the other hand, had gone outside the box, and outside again, and had ordered his servants to bring him both the prisoner and the Pai Sho board._

_"Good. You're thinking ahead." Bumi nodded in satisfaction. "But you're still not thinking far _enough _ahead. Now that I've beaten you so soundly at this game, let me tell you a few interesting facts about the Water Tribe," he said, rearranging the tiles into a wave pattern and hiding his satisfaction at the look of anticipation on the other man's face._

Aang would need to find allies in the Fire Nation. Not power-hungry hotheads who would be more than happy to take down Ozai for the sake of their own ambition, but people who understood their nation's role in the balance. Bumi could simply tell Aang all of this, but he was not the best one to teach Aang that the Fire Nation was not only something to fight against, but also something to fight _for_.

"You'll find your teachers soon enough, Aang," Bumi cackled. "And then you'll have your work cut out for you, oh yes you will."

_They snapped their Pai Sho tiles down onto the board in rapid succession, balancing each other even as they opposed each other. The pattern of the tiles almost, but not quite, formed the shape of a flower. When they were done, Bumi grinned, and his guest shifted uneasily, perhaps unnerved at the sight of those uneven teeth. Or perhaps he was unnerved by something else. Perhaps he had caught a glimpse of one of the many other games being played in that room._

_Uneasiness aside, the young noble seemed to grasp the concept of balance, and was showing faint signs of putting aside the notion of 'victory at all costs' that had infected the Fire Nation and its children. _

_"That's the trick," he said cheerfully. "Thinking ahead twenty, even thirty moves." He'd lost again, but that was all but immaterial. His gamesmanship was nearly perfect, and that was every bit as good as a win to a true afficionado of the game. He looked up at his host, perhaps expecting some sort of congratulations._

_But Bumi merely laughed, cackling, insane. "Twenty or thirty moves?" He was laughing so hard he started coughing. "Boy, I'm not just thinking about what I'll be doing in twenty or thirty_ moves. _Oh, no, no, no... In fact, I'm thinking about the next move_ you're _about to make in a game you're playing twenty or thirty _years _from now!"_

_Once he had stopped laughing, Bumi pushed a face-down tile across the table to his opponent. It still bore the faint scorch marks from their first encounter. "Congratulations. I think I can allow you to live. Go ahead. Take the tile. It's yours to keep as a souvenir." He shrugged. "It was either that or a snow globe with 'A Gift from Omashu' written around the base." _

_The prisoner reached out, picked up the tile, and turned it over. He raised an eyebrow. The tile he held was one he'd never been able to play properly. "The White Lotus?"_

_Bumi settled back in his chair, hands folded over his stomach. _

_"I have a little story to tell you about that tile you're holding. Would you like to hear it? Or would you rather have the snow globe?"_

The Avatar would have to lead the people of the Water Tribes and the Earth Kingdom not just to victories, but to acts of forgiveness so staggering that they seemed nearly impossible. He would not only have to bring down that monster, Ozai, he would have to prevent the civil war that would consume the Fire Nation if the proper person did not take Ozai's throne.

If Aang could not do these things, Bumi knew, the world would soon be locked in a vicious parody of balance in which the scales of power tipped this way and that like a ship in a foundering sea.

"You can't win peace through war, Aang," Bumi said (despite the freedom it afforded, it was lonely in that metal coffin, and if the only voice he could hear was his own, then so be it). "Winning the war and stopping the fighting are two very different things. I just hope I've given you what you'll need to be able to do that, my old friend. I hope it's enough."

Surrendering Omashu to Ozai's men rather than allowing resistance and the following slaughter was hardly the first step in shattering the cycle of pain before it began, and it was hardly the first time his people had questioned the wisdom of such a move.

_The general in charge of the siege of Omashu was returning to the Fire Nation in disgrace, but not until a hostage exchange had been performed._

_"What do you mean you're exchanging him for one of our lieutenants! What possessed you do such a thing?" Bumi's chief advisor was livid. That was fine. Bumi kept him around more for entertainment purposes than actual advice--his face turned the most interesting shade of purple when he was outraged._

_"Lieutenant Xie owes me money. I can't get it back if he's a prisoner of the Fire Nation," Bumi said simply, and watched as his advisor flustered anew. "Besides," he said, waving his hand to dismiss all objections, "it's always nice to practice these random acts of kindness, wouldn't you say?"_

_Truth be told, he would miss his guest's company. The young man had a long way to go, a very long way, but he had made the first moves--strong moves--and Bumi had a good idea not just of what the board would look like in twenty or thirty moves, but what it would look like in twenty or thirty years._

_"Random acts of kindness!" The advisor's voice broke into a higher key. "The man you just released is Fire Lord Azulon's oldest son! Sire, do you have any idea of the kind of advantage Prince Iroh could bring us?"_

_"Yes. Yes, I do," Bumi said, in all seriousness for once._

The reports he had received over the years confirmed that he had played his game well, very well indeed. His former prisoner had progressed far beyond what Bumi had ever dared to hope. There were tense moments, of course. When Bumi had received news of Lu Ten's death he had practically fallen into his chair out of shock, bruising his tailbone and scaring the hell out of his advisors. Oh, he had contingency plans in place, or course; he had seen how crazy, illogical, random moves could shatter even the most careful gamesmanship. But, he wondered, had he planned carefully enough? The thought would haunt him for months. More than that, though, he found that he wished the best for his former prisoner. Bumi had outlived children and grandchildren, and that was not something he would wish on anyone else. But Iroh eventually recovered from his loss (as much as one could, anyhow) and the pattern that Bumi had helped set, the tendencies he'd nurtured, seemed now to be all the stronger for it.

There were several ways the board could yet turn, but Bumi was confident that if his young protégé (not all that young any more, really) didn't seek out the Avatar and show him what the Fire Nation had the potential to become, then perhaps his protégé's protégé would. Eventually. That particular game was in its early stages yet, and he suspected the tide of play would shift a few more times at least.

It was a funny old world, Bumi thought, as his mind once again rearranged the pieces of the future and of the past. Who ever would have imagined that you could gain victory through surrender, or justice through forgiveness? And who ever would have thought that a man could find freedom inside a small metal box? Or that a simple game of Pai Sho could go on so incredibly long and have stakes so incredibly high?


	23. Chief Arnook, Yue: For now

_23. For now..._

When Arnook put his daughter into the spirit pool in a last, desperate attempt at healing, part of him never expected it to work. But when she cried out and he pulled her healthy and white-haired from the water, he didn't pause for more than a second before thanking the spirits for giving him his daughter back.

_For now, _came a warning, barely heard. It seemed to come from the waters. It seemed to come from the sky.

Even without those two words, Arnook would have treasured every following moment with his little girl, but sometimes as he watched her as she was at her lessons, or playing with her friends, or even just sleeping, he would hear those two words echoing not just in his brain, but deep in his bones.

Sometimes, he tried to tell himself that the spirits had a different view of time, and that to them, a life of eighty or even ninety years was so short it couldn't even be considered fleeting. He told himself that, and he knew it was a lie.

So, he did what he could to make sure that Yue enjoyed what little time she had been given (forty years--maybe she'd have forty years, and maybe she'd live to see grandchildren). At the same time, however, Arnook was careful to make sure that she wasn't spoiled. Having everything meant that you were grateful for nothing, and he wanted for Yue to understand the kind of thankfulness he felt every time she smiled at him, every time pursed her mouth when she thought of something that vexed or puzzled her, every time she looked at the ocean as if she were homesick. Every time she laughed, he tried to listen with his whole body, but those two words would always be there, right under the laughter--_for now_.

There were times when Arnook came very close to hating those two spirits. It didn't matter if it was blasphemy, or if the ocean swallowed him or the moon crushed him for thinking such thoughts.

(On Yue's fifteenth birthday, he watched his daughter as she debated which of the rare, imported fruits she would sample first, her hand hovering over a plump blackberry, then over a pink-cheeked apple, then over a voluptuous, bronzy pear.)

The spirits gave him back his daughter. For that, he would be forever grateful.

(She took the apple and bit into it, eyes closing in pleasure and her left hand coming up beneath her chin to catch the juice that was running down. It was better than last year's, she said, and she declared that next year's would be even better.)

But one of them, perhaps out of misguided kindness, or perhaps out of a desire to remind him of his place, had with two words put a most terrible curse on him.

(She caught him watching her, and after a moment's red-faced hesitation, asked her father why he looked so sad.)

A curse, because he could never not wonder if _this_ would be the last birthday apple she would eat, or if _this_ would be the last time she would go sledding, the last time she would laugh, the last time she would pet an owl-cat or brush her hair, tell a joke or sing a song, tell him good morning or...

Why did he have to be given this terrible knowledge? Why couldn't he have been left in ignorance rather than wondering if the next minute would be the last. But even as he thought that, he knew the answer.

He watched Yue as she turned and hugged a friend of hers and he reminded himself yet again to be grateful for what he had while he had it. And if he thought too often about those terrible words, _for now_, he knew he had to be grateful for that as well.

At least he knew now that he had to watch every moment and every movement, to study his daughter and fix her in his mind. And for all that he hated thinking about _for now_, how much worse would it be to try to gather up all these random scraps of memory long after he had tossed them aside in the moment as insignificant?

For as cruel as _for now_ could be, _if only_ was crueller by far.


	24. Zuko: Firebrand

Author's note: This is set sometime after the episode "Bitter Work."

* * *

_24. Firebrand_

"It's okay. The smell takes some people that way." The farm woman held out an earthenware cup full of cold water. It no doubt tasted of minerals and sulfur the way everything did in this part of the Earth Kingdom, but Zuko took it anyway.

He didn't say anything, but he did give her a curt nod, both in thanks and in acknowledgement of the unspoken assurance that apologies were neither necessary nor expected.

Uncle had volunteered them to help with chores at a farm in exchange for a night's food and shelter on their way to Ba Sing Se. At first, Zuko thought they'd gotten off lucky. Instead of hours of back-breaking labor for a meal of watery porridge or gray stew, he was only required to count cattlepig weanlings as they were ushered from pasture, barn, and feedlot into a paddock. They had to be marked, the farmer explained, before they were turned loose into the forest for summer foraging. They'd wander back when the weather became cool, but the local herds inevitably mingled, and some animals didn't always wind up back at the right farms.

So, he'd spent a pleasantly dull summer's afternoon leaning against a split-rail fence and making tick-marks on an old shingle as the small, grunting animals scurried past. To make things even sweeter, an older calf had been picked out of the herd a few days back, and was now slowly roasting in a pit. Once the marking was done, he and Uncle were more than welcome to join in the feast.

He had assumed the farmers would mark the animals with a splotch of dye on their rump, the way musk-sheep were marked in some parts of the Fire Nation. In the Earth Kingdom, however, the preferred method of marking was a brand.

"It wasn't the smell," Zuko said. He handed the cup back to the woman and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before standing up. His legs were much steadier now. An explanation seemed called for, so he offered one up.

He raised a hand to the ruin of his left ear, touching it as lightly as if the burn was still only freshly healed. "It was the sound."

The woman closed her eyes, and her face went ashen in what might have been sympathy, or maybe even horror. "I should have realized... I am sorry. I am so, so sorry."

What he told her was true as far as it went. If you were a firebender, you either got used to the way things smelled when burnt, or you stopped bending. That's all there was to that. Training accidents--his own and others--had quickly inured Zuko to the smell of burning hair, clothing, and flesh. What he remembered--what he would _always_ remember--was the sound of his father's fire rushing past his ear and the too-close sound of his own flesh crackling and dying.

The sound of a hot iron sizzling on fur and hide was nothing compared to that--it was barely audible over the animals' squeals of pain and outrage, and he'd barely even noticed it. That wasn't what had caused him to drop the shingle and run off behind the barn. It was something else that had driven him off and caused him to more fall down than sit down so he could fight off the wave of nausea in peace.

Zuko could barely remember what he looked like without his scar. It was the first thing his eyes went to when he looked in a mirror, and he knew damned well it was the first thing other people noticed about him.

He'd just never wondered until today if maybe his scar was not just a side-effect of the punishment his father had meted out to him. The fear, the searing pain of the burn, and the mind-twisting agony of healing (the usual remedies had, of course, been pointedly withheld)--maybe those were just the side-effects of inflicting a mark that would forever remind Zuko and all those who saw him that he was the Fire Lord's and that the Fire Lord would do with him as he pleased.

In a few days' time, once their brands had healed over and had been checked for signs of infection, the cattlepig calves would be turned loose in the forest to feed on mushrooms, ferns, and acorns, enjoying a life of seeming freedom until the cold drove them back to a place where they would be sorted out according to their owners' needs and whims.

It was an image he would try to forget, but that he suspected would creep up on him at odd times, the way the sound of burning would sometimes lick at his ear when he was caught between sleeping and waking.

Of course, he'd only had a few minutes to try to sort this all out before the woman had shown up with her water and her concern. Zuko wished he hadn't overheard that she had a son about his age, a son who had gone off to fight in the wars and who would never be coming home; it made him feel obligated in some way that he couldn't quite articulate.

"We just wanted to do something for you..." she said, turning the empty cup over and over and looking to him for some sort of absolution.

"I understand." She'd meant to spare their pride by offering them a trade, even a token one, rather than insult them with charity.

"After what you've been through, I wanted to do something to help." Her eyes were bright, and she was practically pleading with him.

"I know." Zuko turned and headed back towards the front of the barn. He could hear very clearly what she was not saying: _please tell me it didn't hurt as much as I know it did_.

"You'll still have supper with us, won't you? Please?"

Again, Zuko only answered with a curt nod. He didn't know what to make of her desperation, or how to answer it. As he rounded the corner of the barn, he focused on the sound of his feet on the gravel walk, hoping to drown out his thoughts and the memory of different noise. The sun was low, and the yard was flooded with the rich light that turned everything firelit and golden just before it went dark. The workers at the paddock were racing against the dying light, but they still paused long enough to look up to see if he was all right.

Zuko could tell from the way they couldn't decide whether to stare or avert their eyes that they weren't looking at him, but rather his scar, red and angry in the afternoon light. One of them nodded brusquely as he passed by, and the look in the man's eyes drove Zuko's gaze back to the rocks at his feet. As with the woman's desperate invitation, he didn't know what to make of it.

Zuko rather suspected he'd be silently given an extra large share of meat that evening, despite the fact that he'd dropped both the tally and his share of the work. Similar things had happened before, not always, not even most of the time, but enough for him to notice: an extra dollop of porridge, or a bowl of gray stew with a better than expected proportion of meat to broth.

For a moment, he thought about stopping, pointing at his scar, and shouting out that _this does not mean that I am one of you!_ but the sound of the quaver in the woman's voice rose above the sound of burning, and as he held out his hand for the shingle, he resigned himself to staying for dinner after all.


	25. Azula: A cautionary tale

Author's note: This nasty little idea has its roots in what Iroh taught Zuko about lightning in "Bitter Work."

* * *

_25. A cautionary tale_

Lightning had always come easily to Princess Azula. She couldn't even remember _how_ she had learned it, only that she had figured it out on her own even as her teachers had droned on and on about the difficulty of the technique, the stillness of heart that was required, the calmness of spirit, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

One might have said that their words went in one ear and out the other, but Azula didn't even pay them that much mind. Words about spiritual and mental discipline became little more than background noise as her full attention was given to the the pretty blue sparks dancing along her fingertips.

She did, however, pay attention to all of the whisperings that she was not meant to hear. Whispers saying that of _course_ the Fire Lord's daughter was a prodigy at bending lightning; a spirit that was cold was certainly calm, and a heart that was absent was certainly still.

Other people might have been hurt by these words, but Azula simply laughed and watched the fear on her teacher's face as her beautiful blue lightning wrapped and warped around a tree, heating the sap until the ancient oak exploded. When the ash and smoke finally settled, she noted with cool satisfaction that her teacher was huddled on the ground with a sliver of wood the length of a man's hand sticking out of his thigh.

"You didn't think to tell the servants that he was there until an hour after you left? Oh, Azula, how could you have forgotten him like that? How could you be so heartless?"

Her mother's words made no more impression than her teacher's. Her teacher should have thought about where he was standing; it was his own fault. And as for her mother's dismay over Azula's heartlessness?

Why, if the absence of a heart made her stronger, that was just fine with her. She had no interest in being as ineffective as her mother or as useless as her brother. Hearts did nothing but get in the way, from what she could tell.

If there were times when her heart pricked at her conscience, trying to remind her of its presence, she soon learned to ignore it. In time, its cries became as meaningless as her teachers' ramblings or her mother's chiding.

Years passed, mothers left, and irrelevant older siblings were sent packing in disgrace. It made no difference to Azula. She had her lightning, and that was all she needed. These days, she was just as often surrounded by electric blue as she was by fiery red when she fought.

She was cold. She was powerful. She was feared. Nothing could stop her, not even foolish old uncles or pathetic older brothers, and certainly not her heart. On the day when her lightning crackled across her uncle's chest, her heart gave one last anguished cry, as if it had been the one to receive the blast, and then it fell silent. Azula was pleased to find that it did not seemed inclined to speak again.

And so, there was nothing to stand in her way and nothing to hold her back when she faced off against her brother one last time. He had no chance. He was no match for her--how could he be, when his fear for his friends, his anguish over fighting her, his dread of failing, were all so clear on his face? Foolish Zuko, always wearing his heart on his sleeve...

Enough. It was time to end this. She sent a bolt of lightning arcing towards him.

And then, something truly strange happened, something she had never even heard of before: the lightning passed through him, and he threw it to the side, away from his friends.

He was absolutely unharmed. How was it possible? Her brows drew together as she tried to puzzle it out.

It didn't matter she decided, sending another bolt straight at him. Anything he could do, she could surpass. She would defeat him and bring him back to her father. It made no difference to her if it was as a prisoner or a corpse. If she'd ever had any regard for the idiot, her heart was blessedly silent on the matter.

Zuko caught the lightning as he had once before. This time, as she had expected, he threw it back at her. Laughing, she reached her hand out to the lightning. Who would catch it next? Which of his friends would Zuko get to see felled by the lightning he had so graciously given back to her?

As the lightning flowed down her arm and into her chest, she had only a moment to wonder at the look of shame and regret on Zuko's face before the jolt knocked all the breath out of her.

_You should never have forgotten about me,_ her heart chided before it went silent, this time forever.


	26. Ursa: A Good Wife

_26. A Good Wife_

Ever since she could walk on her own, Ursa's life had been dedicated to learning every possible lesson there was on how to be a fine lady and a good wife. After all, barely a week after her birth, she had been betrothed to Prince Ozai in a match that would strengthen both her own already powerful family and the Fire Lord's dynastic ambitions.

She learned deportment and calligraphy and dance. She learned how to carry on non-inflammatory discussions in the realms of politics, history, culture, and religion. She became proficient in five different instruments and memorized dozens upon dozens of traditional songs. She never did become adept at embroidery, but she at least learned how to be decorous while ruining fine linens and silks. She was trained in the art of diplomacy and was set to read all of the classics necessary to make her officially well read.

Above all, Ursa was taught that it was important to be virtuous. That, more than anything, more than deportment and calligraphy, was what was expected of a good wife.

When she was told this, Ursa nodded and quietly tucked that bit of knowledge away with everything else she'd learned: sestinas and sonnets, blackwork and cutwork, deportment and discourse.

She had thought she was prepared for her marriage, but three days into her new life at the Fire Lord's court, she wondered if perhaps she should have been taught deception rather than discourse, sycophancy instead of sonnets, and the art of blackmail as opposed to the more decorative art of blackwork.

Fortunately for her, she managed to find a friend who provided a safe haven from a court life that she found repulsive and a husband who was casually cruel and who had no interest her outside of her family's wealth and connections, and her occasional presence in his bed.

Unfortunately, no one had ever told her that it was not enough just to _be_ virtuous. One must also take great pains to _appear_ virtuous.

She wished that someone had told her that being virtuous also meant not showing any preference for the company of her husband's older brother, a recent widower who had a delightful child and an even more delightful sense of humor. It didn't matter that he actually preferred to listen to _her_ opinions on literature rather than hear how well she could parrot conventional opinion--she never should have engaged in any conversations that seemed unusually intent. So what if she could play Pai Sho with him and not worry about him being offended if she had the gall to play to win? She should have known better than to play those games behind closed doors or late into the evening.

_She_ knew that these times spent together were completely innocent, and that she never once considered doing anything more than bestowing a sisterly kiss on her friend's cheek. She knew better than that. She had always known better than that. But who would take her word for it? Or her brother-in-law's?

Oh, there were never any overt accusations. Those would have been politically improvident. There was no proof, after all, only suspicion, and her family was both powerful and easily offended. Instead, there was simply an unbroken thread of sly insinuation and shrouded innuendo laced through every conversation.

At least when her daughter was born, Iroh had been at war and away from the court for nearly two years. Ursa wished she was surprised that Azula was her father's favorite, or that she was the one he chose to name after his own father, but Ursa had finally learned the lesson she wished someone had taught her long ago.

Now, as she watched her son try and fail once again to earn his father's approval, she only wished that someone could teach her how to explain to him why he never could.


	27. Appa: Samsara

_27. Samsara_

The world is new again, and Appa is free to lumber through the skies, pulling the air around and under him as he has since he was a calf. If the small, comforting weight of his boy is on not on Appa's neck, then he is flying alongside, always comfortably close even when not in sight.

The world is new, and yet Appa is haunted by the shadows of the world's end. A shadow hangs over him that has nothing to do with cloud cover. When he flies over water, he jerks and shies whenever a flash of reflected light catches him by surprise and brings with it the memory of stinging flame. There are times when even though he can feel his boy flying alongside him, he constantly swivels his head to _see_ that he is there. (This invariably causes the loud one who rides his neck in place of his boy to shriek like a young female, but Appa cannot break the habit.)

When they are groundbound, and his boy disappears into one building or another, the world ends once again. Alone, Appa fidgets and frets, shuffling from side to side as he waits for the building to start sinking into the earth, or for the cutting ropes to leap out of the sand and bind him to the ground. But the instant his boy comes out again, smiling and bounding over to bury his face in Appa's fur, the shadow abates, the world is reborn. His tongue sweeps over his boy, knocking him laughing to the ground, and Appa forgets the time they spent apart, he forgets the straining and rumbling of the earth, he forgets the ropes, he forgets the cages, he forgets the thorns and the fire and the chains. It as is if they never were. They have perished with the old world.

At night, though, shadows return with sleep and Appa dreams of pacing through ruined halls that are full of memories but strangely absent of his siblings and his boy. It is an empty world, a world that has ended, but just as he begins to fear that _this_ ending will have no ending of its own, the old man who had once tied a message to his horn walks up and rests a hand on Appa's nose. The old man laughs and rests his forehead against the bison's own, and the shadow fades into brilliant light.

Instead of a fire that hurts, Appa remembers a churning, living heat that bears him aloft as well as any wind, and he remembers a person on his neck who is his boy and yet is not his boy, and as he flies the wind does not ruffle through a heavy coat of fur but rather glides over smooth scales.

Then the light fades, but the darkness that replaces it is a comforting one.

Instead of chains that bind him under stone and away from the sky, Appa remembers moving _through_ the earth, free and unafraid, and his boy is a a grown female (but still his boy all the same), and she walks beside him, fingers tangled in fur that is now dark and coarse. Powerful claws push aside rock and root as if they were nothing, and he flies through soil and stone.

"Every ending leads to a new beginning," the old man says quietly, and although Appa does not quite understand, the words comfort him and he knows that tomorrow, the shadows will not haunt him nearly as much as they had the day before.

With that, the old man lifts his head and Appa wakes to find his boy curled up asleep in the crook of his neck, and so the world begins again, just as it has every morning since before he could remember.

* * *

**Author's note:** I'm sure there's more to the concept than this, but "samsara" is the term for the Hindu and/or Buddhist term for "the cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound." (Oxford American Dictionary) 


	28. Gyatso: Put away childish things

_28. Put away childish things_

After Aang left them and the search parties kept coming back with no news other than reports of yet another village fallen to the Fire Nation, Gyatso would often go to the archives at the end of the day, when there was nothing left for him to do but wait and think. Once there, he would go to a place at the rear of the archive, a corner room where everything was utterly still except for the dust motes swirling in the late afternoon sunlight. The old oaken cabinet that took up the entire south wall of the room still looked as if it hadn't been disturbed in years even though Gyatso had been there every day since Aang had left. After making sure he was alone, Gyatso would unlock the cabinet and pull out something that looked like a scroll at first glance, but that was noticeably larger and puffier than most scrolls.

He would then take the rolled up pad to the long table in the center of the room, and the old monk would pause for a moment, all but overcome by the ache in his heart, wondering what he was doing here and why he was doing this.

Was it penance for being too slow to go to Aang's room, or for not being able to track him down in the storm? Or was it to remind himself that since the Avatar light had not shone in the four temples of the four countries, Aang was very likely still alive somewhere.

Or maybe the answer was simply that he missed the boy who was like a son or a grandson to him, and that coming here was better than standing on one of the parapets and staring out into the sky in false hope of a return that he no longer expected to see.

Eventually, he would quiet his restless thoughts and unroll the quilted pad until one by one, four very small, very old toys were revealed, turning to gold in the light of the setting sun. Gyatso knew full well these were not the very first Avatars' original toys. Those had no doubt been loved into oblivion by Avatars past, but the ones before him were more or less faithful replicas. Perhaps the hogmonkey was a bit smaller once, and the drum may once have had a ribbon tassel attached to the handle. He suspects that the turtle was once a painted gourd, and the propeller was a pair of feathers bound at their tips with twine and beads.

Even though they were replicas, the toys were still some of the oldest things in the Temple, and they had been played with by so many young Avatars over the century that they were burned deep into Aang's memory. The stuffed turtle was looking rather deflated around the middle from too much hugging, and the string pull on the propeller was frayed in several places.

Gyatso picked up the propeller, and pulled the string, gently, slowly, so that it would not send the propeller whirling into the air and clattering into the ceiling. It was only natural that Aang would have played with this toy more than the others (although it was years before he could sleep without the turtle squashed tightly to his chest), and much of the wear on the string was no doubt due to his enthusiastic playing.

_Why toys?_ Gyatso wondered, and not for the first time.

He put down the propeller and picked up the drum. It took a several tries, a few desultory _thumps_ and a near tangle, but eventually he was able to roll the handle back and forth in just the right rhythm to get the two beads swinging and beating the drum at a brisk, even pace. Odd, to think that the Fire Nation soldiers who were even now laying waste to the eastern Earth Kingdom had once been innocent children who had played with toys such as this. Gyatso had supervised enough novices to know that children were by no means inherently good, but that same experience had also taught him that neither were they inherently evil.

The last Avatar had been from the Fire Nation and had been a good man. Gyatso had met him a few times over the years, and every time he'd been awestruck by the stern serenity that radiated from him. Gyatso abruptly stopped twirling the drum and put it back on the pad. It was hard--impossible--to imagine that dignified ancient playing with a red and yellow drum or a wooden hogmonkey. Speaking of hogmonkeys...

"Tch. Look at you," he said affectionately, picking up the hogmonkey. It was the least favorite of the four toys (no surprise, given that it represented Aang's opposite element), but it was still a favorite. In fact, Gyatso finally noticed, it had been played with so much that the dots of paint that served as eyes had all but been worn away. Well-loved, indeed.

One day, when Aang was old, older than Gyatso was now, (_oh, please, that such a thing may come to pass_), would someone, some novice archivist, look at these toys and try to imagine wise old Avatar Aang ever being young enough to play with such things?

All the pranks, the light-hearted cheating at Pai Sho, the _cakes_!--maybe Gyatso had been foolish to spend so much time on such things. Maybe the abbot was right in saying he had let his affection for the boy cloud his judgment. But it seemed wrong, somehow, that Aang might someday be seen as stern as Roku was, or as fearsome as legend had painted Kiyoshi.

And these toys had once been theirs. They had once picked them out from among thousands of other toys, drawn to them by a sense of familiarity they could not explain.

Again, he wondered, _why toys?_

Why not Roku's cloak? Why not Kiyoshi's fans? Gyatso thought--with a forgivable lack of charity--that some of his fellow monks would have preferred to present the Avatar candidates with items such as these rather than the more humble items that had been the test for dozens of previous Avatars.

A battered propeller that had been propelled into lakes a few too many times. A threadbare turtle. A drum whose bright paint was scarred from beating. A wooden hogmonkey with a worn-off face.

Well-loved, he reminded himself, eyes closing in pain as he once again though of Aang sleeping with the old turtle clutched tightly to him. _Well-loved._

As he put the hogmonkey carefully back in its place, Gyatso found himself hoping that Roku and Kiyoshi had been lucky enough to have mentors whose judgment had been clouded by their affection. And as he rolled the quilt back up one more time and put the toys back in their cabinet, he gave thanks for the tacit permission Aang's predecessors had given him, the reminder that in addition to being the Avatar, Aang was also a child.

_Well-loved_, he thought once more, locking the cabinet and heading out to evening meditation.


	29. Iroh: A Tale of Two Cities

_29. A Tale of Two Cities_

In the end, getting into Ba Sing Se was as simple as handing over a ticket and a forged passport. Instead of six years encamped outside unbreakable gates and a wall that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon, he was only required to spend six hours parked on a series of moderately uncomfortable benches, or standing patiently in a line that stretched back through the door and halfway down the steps.

Less than a decade ago, General Iroh had the finest soldiers, men and women who every morning proclaimed themselves to be the truest sons and daughters of the Fire Nation, at his back. He had dozens of siege engines at his command, terrible machines of black and towering iron, their hydraulics ready with chemicals that would arc hundreds of yards to stick and burn until everything they covered was reduced to white ash. He had supplies and tents lavish enough that he might as well have been in the Fire Lord's palace. He had intelligence reports, estimates and diagrams from sappers and engineers, maps and schedules, so many that he had three lieutenants under his command whose sole job it was to read all of these documents and point him to the things he absolutely had to know.

None of these things did him any good in the end. They couldn't get him into the city and they couldn't bring back his son.

He closed his eyes against the grayness that even now threatened to overtake him whenever he thought even obliquely about that day, and he told himself that this time, things would be different.

Things were already very different, in more ways than he could count. After all, here he was, standing quietly in line instead of listening to lieutenants' reports, and the only siege he was planning was trying to figure out what honeyed words would smooth their way past the humorless and shovel-faced harridans who manned the various ticket and passport checkpoints that stood between him and Ba Sing Se. Instead of legions of soldiers who'd vowed to spill their blood for their country's sake, he had only a loose network of men and women who were wise enough or broken enough to see national pride for the illusion it was. In the place of tables laden of exquisitely drafted plans, he had only a cloth pouch containing two small passports, expertly forged and aged by a man who from all appearances was allergic to daylight. Once in the city proper, he would be satisfied with a week-to-week lease on a one-room apartment rather than with seeing the Fire Nation flag flying over the turrets of the Earth King's palace.

There was another difference as well, and it was on this difference that all his hopes and fears were balanced.

He cast a glance out of the corner of his eye. Zuko was only a few feet away, arms wrapped tightly around himself and standing stiffly, glaring at anyone who passed within less than a yard of him. Looking at him, one would think that he believed that any human contact would carry some horrible contagion.

Iroh sighed and looked away again. Yes, Zuko was alive, but even so he was nearly as unreachable as Lu Ten. There was hardly any sign of the bright-spirited and sweetly awkward boy beneath that scarred, scowling mask. There were times when Iroh could hardly recognize him, just as he had hardly recognized Lu Ten when he had been brought back from the city gates, his face pale and drained of all animation and impish humor.

He reached out a hand to Zuko's shoulder, but Zuko shrugged it aside, half-lifting his own hand as if about to bat Iroh's away.

Sometimes, it was as if Ozai's fire had killed Zuko just as surely as an Earth Kingdom arrow had killed Lu Ten. In idle moments, Iroh was amazed that these things had not killed him as well.

When his wife--his adorable, funny, darling wife--had died, Iroh had grieved, yes, but that was different. She had been taken by a lingering illness, and as horrible as the whole thing was, at least it had given him time to come to some sort of peace. Besides, he was never allowed to retreat too far into his grief; he had a son to raise, a rambunctious two-year-old who did not know enough to understand that the world was supposed to stop when his mother died.

But when Lu Ten had been brought back to his tent, so still, too still, Iroh finally understood why they called it _heartbreak_. He had stood there, unable to think and unable to react, as some giant hand had coldly reached out and squeezed his chest, burning him with a cold, unquenchable fire that reduced everything within to a fine, white ash.

As they had approached Ba Sing Se, Iroh noted almost in passing that the scorch marks surrounding the giant gates had been covered over with a thin layer of stone. He could still see, however, faint differences in the surface of the wall. Some areas were a little too smooth, almost shiny, like faded scars over old wounds. He knew, though, just how hot the mixture of naphtha, sulfur, and oil had burned, and he knew all too well that scars could cover much deeper damage, the kind that could not be patched or repaired so easily.

Up ahead of them, one of the desk harridans cut the air with a curt wave, signalling the next group forward. And with that, the Dragon of the West entered the city of Ba Sing Se without a fight.

No, his next fight would have nothing to do with conquering a city, but it would be just as difficult.

He let Zuko brush past him, eager as ever to escape the crowd. As his nephew passed, Iroh again reached out and again was brushed off. Just as it was six years ago, it felt as if every advance was countered with an equal and opposite setback.

He had a different kind of siege to plan this time, Iroh thought as ahead of him the stiffness of Zuko's back disappeared into the train. He only hoped that this time, things would not end in cold fire and fine, white ash.

* * *

**Author's note:** Well, one more left in this series. It's been a fun trip, and once my muse returns from its extended vacation, I may very well add a few more to this story sequence. But in any case, for what I plan to be the last one, I'll be stepping away from the angst and delving into something a little more fluffy and romantic.

Thank you all so very much for all of the kind reviews and comments. I'm glad you have enjoyed reading these stories.


	30. Smellerbee,Longshot: A Walk in the Woods

Thanks again to all who reviewed. I hope to write some more Avatar fic over the summer, but for now, this is an end to this particular series. I had a lot of fun writing it, and I'm glad that so many people seemed to have enjoyed reading it. As a farewell, I'll be leaving you with something at the happier end of the spectrum.

* * *

_30. A walk in the woods_

"Would you stop being such a jerk! Hah!"

Smellerbee jumped up and swiped at the brace of squirrel-grouse, but Longshot raised them even higher above her head. His face was as impassive as always, but she knew damn well he was laughing.

"Fine. If you're going to be that way..."

She crossed her arms over her chest, and the creaking of leather armor said as much as a scoff or a huff would have. Longshot, damn him, lowered the squirrel-grouse back to his side. The two bundles of fur and feather bounced against his knee as they walked along, and for a while the only sound was that of feet on fallen leaves or the muffled clank of their weapons shifting as they climbed up a hill or jumped over a dry creekbed.

Normally, she wouldn't be stalking along in a straight line in front of him, occasionally sneaking a glance over her shoulder to see if he was laughing at her (he was). It would have been more like her to be half-crouched, looking around her all the time, keeping an eye out for the faint shift-and-rustle that would tell her that a woodrabbit might be burrowing under that leaf pile, or another flock of squirrel-grouse might be in that thicket. She wouldn't say a word, and even Longshot's usual silence would be more quiet than normal.

She was still watching for game, even though half her attention remained on Longshot. By the time they reached camp, she had flushed out three more squirrel-grouse and a pair of ermine doves. Longshot took them all down neatly and quietly, and when he had collected them, took some twine from his pocket and added them to the bundle by his side.

"I can carry them just as well as you can, you know," she said as he was bent over, tying twine around the doves' legs.

Longshot smiled up at her from under the brim of his hat. Then he just shook his head as he straightened up and headed off again in teasing silence.

Smellerbee stood and fumed for a moment before following. She wanted to stomp up behind him, kick him in the rear, and remind him that being a girl didn't mean she was weak. She had a notion, though, that doing either of those things, the reminding, or the kicking, might be a bit problematic. Instead, she just kept pace behind her friend, her eyes on his back and noticing just a little too much how his shoulders moved as he walked. She didn't spot any more game on the way back to camp.

They were silent, just as they usually were, but the silence had changed. She felt pressured to say something, anything, even just nonsense to fill the space, and she got the feeling that Longshot was always on the verge of actually speaking, or laughing out loud, or something. Lately, for whatever reason, they were always bickering like this, Longshot doing stuff that she guessed was supposed to be nice, but it always turned into something teasing, or else she got annoyed with him for some reason that she couldn't quite pin down. Something had changed, and she wasn't sure she liked it.

Still, it was always the two of them who did the hunting. Just them. They didn't even give the others a chance to suggest that they rotate that duty.

When they returned to camp, Jet looked at them for a good long moment, eyebrows raised, then just shrugged and turned back to what he was doing. "It's Sneers's turn to cook tonight," he called out as they passed. Smellerbee wanted to ask him what he meant by that look, but the Duke had come barreling up, and had started yammering away to him about something or another.

Sometimes, Smellerbee wondered what had happened to her crush on Jet. She still loved him, still looked up to him, but it wasn't like it was when she had first joined the gang and had spun out long involved fantasies about how as the only female member of the group, it was only natural that she and Jet would wind up together. Somewhere along the line, that all changed. Maybe it was because she'd figured out that Jet was kind of crazy, or maybe it was something else.

Longshot lazily slung the bundle of game to Sneers, who protested loudly at getting a sudden armful of bloody fur, feathers, and beaks but Longshot kept on walking. Smellerbee was just about to ask Sneers if he needed help with the skinning and jointing, but Longshot cast a brief and anxious glance over his shoulder:

_You coming with?_

She shrugged an apology to Sneers, then followed along after Longshot without even questioning why. She grinned when she saw his shoulders relax as he heard her trot up behind her.

"We'd better back before supper," she informed him. "The others will eat everything if we let 'em. You know them--they won't even leave us a bone."

They walked along in silence for a while, heading back into the woods even though they had just brought back enough food for the next two days. For a while, the silence was back to its usual, comforting self, and that was good. As they passed out of sight of the camp, Smellerbee jumped up and batted at the back of Longshot's hat, tilting it over his eyes. Not for any reason. Just because.

Longshot sighed and tilted the hat back to true. Then he smiled down at her, teasing and affectionate, and the silence became not-comfortable again, just like that. But maybe that wasn't such a bad thing, after all.


End file.
